On Tuesday I talked about how I don't like modal dialogs.  Here's one way to avoid using them when designing an application.

I learned this one from Gmail, but there are other applications out there doing the same type of thing. Imagine if someone accidentally clicks the "delete" button in your application.  The results could be disastrous.  That's why most websites pop up a window saying "are you sure?"

The problem is, most of the time the use wasn't clicking the delete button by accident.  Most of the time the user actually wants to delete something and it's annoying having to deal with the confirm dialog.

With most important decisions, gmail just goes ahead and performs the action.  Then they pop up an unobtrusive message at the top of the page allowing the user to undo the action.  This makes sure that accidental clicks don't result in catastrophe but the user isn't inconvenienced in situations where they're doing everything correctly.

Sounds simple enough, but it's far from standard practice.  Sometimes it's not necessary to go through the effort of undoing things, but other times it can be a huge time saver.  If you remove enough minor inconveniences, you'll end up with great user interface.

I'm trying to incorporate not only this specific strategy at work, but any design ideas that follow the same line of thought.  For example, we will be redesigning one of our sign-up processes soon and I've already figured out one way to make it much easier.  Rather than showing the user every single option they can customize during signup, I think we'll just show the basics and then the advanced users can go in later and make changes that the majority of our users don't want to deal with.

Once again, this is an obvious idea which makes it all the more important to implement.