deft flux

A portal into the creative workings of David Meyer

"Remove" and "Delete" are different

It has been a cause of annoyance for me when software authors confuse the words "remove" and "delete" in their interfaces, especially since it often involves the sensitivity of your data.

Remove means taking an item off of some sort of list, but by definition, it does not imply destruction of the item itself.

Delete also means crossing off an item, but it implies that the item is also forever destroyed.

The worst case where these are confused is when "remove" is used to describe a process that actually deletes the item, because then the user might click "remove" thinking that the underlying item will still exist, but it is instead deleted.  Also annoying is when "delete" is used to describe a process that only removes the item, because it feels weird clicking "delete" when I know I only want to remove the item, and a user might click "delete" thinking that the item will be destroyed, but it is not.

I wish I had an example of the former case to reference, but I can't think of one off hand.  But I know I have seen it more than once.  An example of the latter case is in Free Download Manager.  The "Delete download" option only removes the download from the list.  It does not delete the downloaded files, as one would think it would.

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Categories: Development
Posted by deftflux on Monday, November 10, 2008 12:47 PM
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