When a user wants to remove something we tend to protect them by:
- asking for a confirmation, yes | no
- giving them an option to undo
This holds up for content that actually gets deleted. An email you delete, or trashing a photo. But what about less critical actions? Like removing a tag from an article, or un-friending someone? In such cases no content gets deleted, it is just a relation which is not there anymore. But adding it again is trivial.
One approach is to not guide at all. Just a red cross, and clicking it removed the tag from the article. Are there any ways to guide users in this? (Except for making it easy to re-create it.)
Answer
How about providing a brief message that's displayed right after the action, giving you a chance to reconsider? "You un-friended Jack. You will no longer receive updates from him. Undo?" If the message doesn't open a dialog but appears on the page itself, and it disappears automatically a second later, then it can be very subtle and non-interfering. This is a bit different from "making it easy to recreate it", because it's closer to "having never un-friended Jack in the first place" than to "re-friending Jack". It may even cause different behaviors - like not really un-friending Jack until the immediate undo option had disappeared.
Alternatively, you can prove this info on hover/tooltip on the button, before the action is performed.
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