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Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

> THIS IS IRREVERSIBLE

I might use a word other than irreversible. At a glance, a wishful brain can see “This is reversible”. A vocabulary challenged brain may think “oh cool, it’s reversible”, or revert to the wishful thinking brain.

Ideas:

- ALL YOUR STUFF WILL BE GONE FOREVER

- YOUR ACCOUNT CANNOT BE RESTORED

- IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO RESTORE YOUR ACCOUNT

The thing they keep asking you to do is undelete. Tailor your messaging to explicitly indicate the opposite of the outcome users keep asking for. Irreversible requires some interpretation, even though it probably makes perfect sense to most people.

(Hard learned lessons after years in enterprise product management. It’s amazing how many odd conclusions users can reach about seemingly obvious labels and messages).

Not much to be done about the ones who don’t read at all.

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The best way of making statements for things like this is to disclude any negatives in it. Don’t include any “cannot”, “never”, “is impossible”, etc because if they are ignored then the statement reverses in meaning.

Instead, describe the action with a word that is negative in and of itself e.g. “Please Delete Everything”. So instead of “Your account cannot be restored”, it’s “Your account will be (irrevocably) deleted”.

And if a word has a positive affirmation as a substring of the negative affirmation, then avoid using it aswell since it’s a similar principal.

I think these are good guiding principles.

> And if a word has a positive affirmation as a substring of the negative affirmation, then avoid using it

I think this also means “Your account will be (irrevocably) deleted” is off the table ;)

The wishful brain will see “will not be gone forever”, “can be restored”, “it is possible”. Face it, depending on people reading things leads to doom.

Yeah, even crystal clear messaging won’t fix all cases.

But crystal clear messaging is low hanging fruit that does help. The goal is to raise the bar for the wishful brain, and to eliminate as many semi-plausible wishes as possible.

Combining this with a cooling off period is probably the next best step.

There will always be exceptions, no matter how much wordsmithing you do.

Much more likely to mentally skip over an extant negation than introduce a phantom one.

My personal favorite: Driving through backroads with some friends, sign says "Impassible Road: No Tow Service Available". Friend turns down it, drives half a mile, gets stuck. "No worries, we'll just call the tow service. Anyone remember their number?". Queue a half hour of us on our knees digging mud around.

If you're seriously concerned with the morons who don't read:

"To delete your account enter the exact name of your account in the first field and enter the normal color of the daytime sky in the second field."

If you don't read you won't be able to answer the second field and the button won't go hot. Use many different options for the second field so people can't become habituated to filling it in. Note that the answer to the verification does not appear in the text, you can't skim for the answer but have to actually read the whole thing.

Starting from the premise that users are morons instead of “users are busy and distracted” is problematic.

There’s a degree of user hostility here that seems likely to distract users from the task at hand, and if busyness/distractedness is the actual issue, adding a new level of distraction on top (now start thinking about the color of the daytime sky, a task that is wholly unrelated to the outcome), seems likely to backfire at best, and will piss off the rest of the customers by degrading user experience at worst.

I think there’s a balance to be found by adding enough friction while using that friction to orient the user towards the realization you want them to have (“this is permanent”), and sky puzzles only add friction.

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