Hold-to-confirm

(The above is actually clickable - try it!)

This is an idea I had today while I was buying stuff on eBay and enduring the interminable 12-click process you have to go through: Yes, I want to buy it. Yes, I confirm I want to buy it. Yes, I want to pay for it. Yes, I want to pay for it with PayPal... and so on. I assume it's to stop you buying stuff by accident, but it's still a bit ridiculous.

Google have, for a long time, been fighting the good fight against confirmation screens. Their philosophy is to ask for forgiveness rather than confirmation. Yep, you just accidentally pressed that button and deleted your email. Did you want it back? Okay, just hit undo. All better.

Two problems with that: firstly, not every transaction is undo-able. Spending money, for example, is a lot of hassle to undo. The other problem is that it's still frustrating when the computer does something you don't want, even if you get an undo button. I can't count the number of times I've accidentally deleted emails on my phone while trying to scroll. That frustration doesn't undo either.

So here's an interesting way to look at it: just make the button a bit harder to click. I'm okay with waiting a couple seconds if I don't have to navigate to any more screens, confirm anything else or hit undo. I creatively called it hold-to-confirm. If you want to take a look at the source there's a cleaner version on GitHub.