There’s been a loss of usability for people who type text.
Like me, you may have experienced these unwelcome experiences:
- After typing a long message in Facebook, when I click send, I get a page error and my entire message is lost.
- After typing a post in WordPress, if the server has gone down or I press an unintended keyboard shortcut, I lose my entire post.
By comparison, if Word stops responding, it will (try to) offer me my unsaved changes when I reopen the document.
With users increasingly doing their work in browsers, why don’t browsers remember the text we were typing? Or why doesn’t the operating system? Or why doesn’t the weblication make backups? Or the server?
When my actions in a browser fail, imagine a message such as this:
This hints at just one possible solution. In the spirit of Five Sketches™, I bet you can come up with at least five more ways to support users after they’ve lost the work they typed in a browser.