Product Design: A Story of Delete and Undelete

Why the two should always come together!

Have you ever lost a digital file? Maybe you or someone else deleted it by mistake? Or maybe the technology failed, such as a hard disk crash. Regardless of the reasons on how it became deleted, the feeling is always the same “Oh %#$!”, followed by I really wished that did not happen. For the really lucky ones, you are grateful to be able to recover it from a backup that was made. Nowadays, we are fortunate to have automated cloud backups to save us when these tragic events happen. However, this is not always the case, even today with the cloud everywhere, why is that?

“To delete or not to delete”

Well, the story goes back to the day that the concept of ‘delete’ was invented. To a day where the deletion was needed for several reasons. The first reason was to make space on very limited storage systems, I am talking about the days we had 180Kb floppy discs, where we would commonly receive ‘Disk full messages’, where we had two options, delete something or put in a new disk. The second reason, has more do to with our culture during the era of digital technology birth, in short, we wanted to delete something to hide it, whether it was to erase a mistake one had made, after-all we mostly prefer to not inform everyone that we made a mistake, or to hide something that we did not want others to find out for numerous reasons.

Since then, ‘delete’ has remained a persistent function of pretty much every piece of software. Some of them handle it more gracefully, for example, they provide an ‘undelete’ function, and/or version history, as in the case of Google documents. In fact, version history became the norm in software development back in the 90’s; as an efficient and effective way to roll way to older versions of code, when we realized that the new direction was no longer fruitful and to enable us to address the inevitable human errors that we all make daily.

“To delete and undelete”

The ones that don’t, well they need to rethink their product design as it dramatically impacts the user experience. Think about a user, maybe a paying user using your software application or online digital service, unwittingly delete a piece of work; well, we all know what comes next: “Oh %#$, I really wished that I had not done that!” followed by, where’s the ‘undelete’ and/or recover function? And then the realization there isn’t one, followed by who designed this product! “Ok, that’s it I am not using this service anymore, I am going to look for one that has a ‘undelete’ and/or recovery function, as I know that I often make mistakes.”

“We all make mistakes, after all, we are only human!”

Why in these days of virtually unlimited storage would you not have added an ‘undelete’ function! The mind boggles. Dear product designers and/or owners, if you haven’t yet implemented an ‘undelete’ function in your software application or online digital service, added it in as a critical bug so that gets into your product roadmap, before you start to lose users base and then wonder why.

What are your thoughts?

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