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Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

[show = all but deleted] -> [select all] -> [resume]

It's not rocket science :/

The UI is 100% clear. This is a non-story. As soon as you log in, top right shows "Show | all / all active / all but deleted".

It's actually quite worrying the poster is spending a lot on adwords, yet doesn't seem to understand the UI and instead suggests setting all your bids to 0.01 to avoid resuming deleted campaigns having a big effect.

Choosing [show = all] shows deleted campaigns, and if you select them all, you can resume them...

To suggest this is "intentionally deceptive" is laughable. Worrying this has been voted up to #1

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No. One of the first rules I ever learned about human factors was to translate "user error" into "design flaw." A mistake that is easy to make is a design problem. In this case, this easy-to-make mistake benefits Google.

It's probably not intentionally deceptive, but it is deceptive and Google should fix the problem.

Default actions should not affect deleted items. Think about GMail: "All Mail" excludes your Spam and Trash.

> In this case, this easy-to-make mistake benefits Google.

And, worse, it seems to be a pattern. Clicked the wrong button in your adsense campaign? No appeal, we take your money. We detected fraud in your google payments account? No appeal, we take your money. We detected click fraud in your adsense displays? No appeal, we take your money.

I'm glad I don't do any business with them.

Why would they give you an appeal? They are not a charity organisation they are a business for profit. If something they are doing is illegal then by right you have access to the courts. Use them.

The market mechanism should step in before the courts (i.e. they would give you an appeal to stop from losing you to the competition). The problem in this case is that there are no significant competitors.

That's like saying, "Why would you talk to their customer service when you could just sue?" The courts are there as a last resort, not as a default place to settle things. Your statement also implies that there's not a relationship between how one treats their customers and bottom line, which is pretty far from the truth.

>> "Clicked the wrong button in your adsense campaign? No appeal, we take your money."

Perhaps you mean Adwords sigh.

I did indeed, my humblest apologies.

>> "...translate "user error" into "design flaw." A mistake that is easy to make is a design problem."

How easy is it to make? One person has blogged that he made it. It's not easy to make IMHO at all. If you translate "user error" into "design flaw", then your product will always have flaws. If you have functionality, someone will get confused and misunderstand.

Blaming the user is rarely the correct response to an incident.

The user selected all of the campaigns, some of which were deleted, and clicked [resume]. I'm not really sure who else you could blame.

It also takes a second to check through afterwards to make sure you resumed the campaigns you wanted.

The company that doesn't let you delete things.

And why do they not let you delete things? because then you'd moan that all your stats were wrong and don't add up.

Then call it archive or something?

I find it strange that anyone would argue in favor of this deletion-means-paused behavior. It's counter-intuitive to many people (me included).

Disagree. Once deleted you'd also think that they would not be impacted by a resume command. Delete = never run again.

I myself wish Google offered a true delete to campaigns in AdWords. It makes for a confusing interface.

Here's the part of the article that struck me as Google's big UI mistake:

"From the campaign summary screen the status of each of these campaigns reads in big red letters as it did before, during and after the issue - DELETED..."

What is the point of having a "deleted" option on a campaign if you can run it while it is deleted? To me, "deleted" suggests that the campaign can no longer be active. But in this case, the "deleted" option actually means "not visible in most views". A much better label for the option would be "hidden".

And even then it would be extremely unlikely for a user to want a campaign that is both "hidden" and active. The UI should prompt the user if they try to make a hidden campaign active, and, if approved, it should make the campaign non-hidden at the same time it activates it.

"Must be user error" - I thought it's a joke.

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