I used to put a confirmation popup before every delete action in our dashboard. I thought I was protecting our customers from making mistakes and ruining their own data.
I watched session recordings. Realized people blindly click the confirmation without reading the warning text. The confirmation became muscle memory so they were still accidentally deleting projects and flooding our support inbox. The friction annoyed users while completely failing to protect the distracted ones.
We completely removed the confirmation boxes. Built a soft-delete system instead. Now when someone clicks delete the item instantly vanishes from their view. A small toast notification appears with an undo button.
Our accidental deletion tickets dropped to near zero within a week. Users get a smoother interface without annoying popups and they have a five-second window to fix a mistake when they actually make one.
