After writing my last post on Instapaper, I started asking myself “what could be done to solve the problem?” I’ve come up with a few ideas that might work. First, here is a picture of what Instapaper looks like when you’re looking at your list of unread pages:

And when you click delete on an article, you get the following prompt.

As the annotations illustrate, theres a fair distance to move between the delete link of a page near the bottom and the buttons to accept/cancel the prompt. My first idea was to simply move the prompt beside the article you’re deleting with some fancy javascript popup. It might look something like this:

However popups are slightly annoying, they may cover some other content (in this case, the ads for Instapaper subscriptions – which the people in charge likely won’t want hidden), and this still requires you to move the mouse – though a considerably shorter distance. So back to the drawing board I went. Solution two was to change what’s displayed in the “Source – Date – Share – Edit – Delete” area to an in-line prompt:

This way, if the user really did want to delete that page, all they have to do is click again – the “Yes, delete it” link is directly underneath where the “Delete” link was. Now my choice of colours/font is rough, but the idea is clear. After clicking yes, the section for that page would be removed from the list. After clicking no, the prompt would go away (possibly via a nice animation) and the previous “Source – Date – Share – Edit – Delete” display would return. Note two choices I did make though:

1. Using actions instead of simple Yes/No responses. This makes it clear to the user what they’ll be doing when they click one of the choices. Additionally, it may become clear what they are being promted to do just by reading their options.
2. Normally, the positive action (in this case “Yes, delete it”) is the first option on the left, and the negative action is on the right. This is how I arranged the responses in my first solution. In this one, I reversed the responses so that the user could click again without having to move their mouse if they did intend to delete the page. However, this may break some mental models – which would likely make the trade-off not worth it. Usability testing here may be required.

And that’s it! If you have other ideas, or thoughts on the ones I suggested – leave ‘em in the comments.