logoalt Hacker News

9rxlast Thursday at 7:43 PM5 repliesview on HN

The problem isn't so much the five seconds, it is the muscle memory. You become accustomed to blindly hitting "Yes" every time you've accidentally typed something into the text box, and then that time when you actually put a lot of effort into something... Boom. Its gone. I have been bitten before. Something like the parent described would be a huge improvement.

Granted, it seems the even better UX is to save what the user inputs and let them recover if they lost something important. That would also help for other things, like crashes, which have also burned me in the past. But tradeoffs, as always.


Replies

addaonlast Thursday at 8:33 PM

> You become accustomed to blindly hitting "Yes" every time you've accidentally typed something into the text box, and then that time when you actually put a lot of effort into something... Boom. Its gone.

Wouldn't you just hit undo? Yeah, it's a bit obnoxious that Chrome for example uses cmd-shift-T to undo in this case instead of the application-wide undo stack, but I feel like the focus for improving software resilience to user error should continue to be on increasing the power of the undo stack (like it's been for more than 30 years so far), not trying to optimize what gets put in the undo stack in the first place.

show 2 replies
fckgwlast Thursday at 9:21 PM

Which is fine! That's me making the explicit choice that yes, I want to close this box and yes, I want to lose this data. I don't need an AI evaluating how important it thinks I am and second guessing my judgement call.

I tell the computer what to do, not the other way around.

show 1 reply
officeplantlast Thursday at 8:07 PM

>You become accustomed to blindly hitting "Yes" every time you've accidentally typed something into the text box, and then that time when you actually put a lot of effort into something... Boom. Its gone.

I'm not sure we need even local AI's reading everything we do for what amounts to a skill issue.

show 1 reply
pavel_lishinlast Thursday at 8:07 PM

I have the exact opposite muscle memory.

th0ma5last Thursday at 9:03 PM

I think this is covered in the Bainbridge automation paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation ... When the user doesn't have practiced context like you described, to be expected to suddenly have that practiced context to do the right thing in a surprise moment is untenable.