Study 010 / choice
Can a small interruption protect a deliberate choice?
Design protocol
Compare immediate deletion, a contextual confirmation, and an undo window in a fictional task. Measure intended completion, unintended action, comprehension, recovery, and burden. Use no real destructive actions.
Design protocol only. No claim of benefit has been measured.
Download the protocols ↓Study 010 / A pause with a purpose
01 / Observation
An irreversible action may be easy to trigger while its consequence is difficult to undo.
02 / Hypothesis
A clear confirmation or a reversible action may reduce unintended outcomes while preserving task completion.
03 / Mechanism
Friction can create a moment to inspect consequences. It can also cause fatigue, exclusion, and repeated automatic dismissal.
04 / Experiment
Compare immediate deletion, a contextual confirmation, and an undo window in a fictional task. Measure intended completion, unintended action, comprehension, recovery, and burden. Use no real destructive actions.
05 / Result
Design protocol only. No claim of benefit has been measured.
06 / Alternative explanations
Practice, salience of the prompt, differences in reading ability, motor access, and unfamiliarity with the task.
07 / Real-world use
Deleting work, sending messages, changing access, or confirming a consequential choice.
08 / Ethical dimension
The person’s goal defines success. A protective pause should not become a trap or make the alternative unnecessarily difficult.
09 / Countermeasure
Keep consequences explicit, preserve an exit, and favour reversibility where it is available.
Short summaries in our own words: what the research found, why it belongs here, and where its conclusions stop. These papers provide background; they do not report results from your visit.
Large-scale observational field study
Browser records covering millions of security warnings showed that responses varied with warning type and browser. Warnings were not uniformly ignored. For a protective pause, the lesson is to measure comprehension and behaviour in context; this observational study does not establish that our proposed confirmation or undo design will help.
Survey and field experiments
Experiments found that briefly directing attention toward accuracy could improve the quality of subsequently shared news. A useful interruption can focus attention on a relevant goal. This is an analogy for a consequential-action pause, not evidence that adding a delay to deletion is effective; that needs its own comparison.
A protocol makes the proposed comparison inspectable before data exist. Related findings do not guarantee the planned field study will reproduce them.