Express clear - redundant or efficient

Hey everyone,

In need of some input. I’ve recently built this specific screen where one can ONLY check availability for accommodations. So Obviously I have the tick boxes, enabling bulk delete and then also a “Clear All” function for express delete.

However, this has brought up quite a debate on whether that button is necessary or not. In my opinion it’s an express clear and I’ve been using that button quite a lot as I’ve worked through this feature, intentionally not using the tick boxes as I feel it’s a slightly longer process.

The copy of the button is debatable so I’m mainly looking to get feedback regarding the viability of this button.

Any input regarding this?

Hey there!

So it’s my understanding, your question is: “clear list button is useful or not useful

Let me ask you a question first. Why did you think that your product need it? did you observed that user leaves your product because it’s hard to delete all? or it’s just your personal thought that user will need it?

useful or not useful, that’s the question!

IMHO, This is the one of the main question we need to find the answer as a UXer.

To determine something useful, users try to use it.

If they can use it "efficiently":
  it's useful 
otherwise:
 not useful (useless)

Of course determining usefulness is much more complex process than this. I just want to show the main idea.

We need users who use the product

If users didn’t need it to use it, we wouldn’t talk about UX domain or at least Usability. We would handle things by asking the boss and co-workers.

We should observe the truth, not ask directly

Another important thing that’s my understanding of UX is : there’s a difference between finding answer and getting answer.

Getting answer is simple. you ask question directly. Do you like this color or not? Do you think this button useful or not?

Answers user give us doesn’t show the truth as always, which’s the reason. To find real answer, we shouldn’t ask direct question the user, instead observe it.

If you consider us as a user, instead of asking. It’s usefull or not? You can tell us:

“You’re a user who wants to clear all product from list and tell us how would you do it”

At this point we need a protoype to test it and lastly we should keep in mind not to forget that we (forum users) might not represent real users.

I am not sure whether I understand the interface correctly, but I am trying to give feedback based on what I think is intended.

The Clear List button in my understanding wipes the complete list of selected accomodations instead of deleting the entries one by one. If that is the case, does it also mean resetting the form to the initial lauch state? So would navigating away from that view - eg by going to the home page - do the same reset of the list?

What is the intention of the tickbox at the top of the list, next to the label “Accommodation”? Does it serve to select all items at once? And could that be used to select all and then - eg via an action selector - delete all? This would provide a similar function as the Clear List button.

You mention that you were using this yourself often during testing. In my own experience I have observed that during testing an unnatural behaviour surfaces because you know the purpose of certain functions you have built and use it to “prove” for yourself that this is the better way to use your product. My point here is that it is a subjective view, and as such I agree with @zehir that only real user testing will show the true behaviour.

Hope that helps.

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Hey @marks78, thanks for your feedback. So in a nutshell, this screen is quite dynamic. Once you clear the list, only the accommodations in the grid will be cleared, and the expanded panel will collapse, leaving the populated left-hand side so you can browse and add more products - in this particular tool, people check availability of lots of accommodations as they are planning tours for clients.

So the top tick box are there to select all and remove. Obviously also empowering you to multi select and delete a range of accommodations. In my usability test, not everyone knew that the top tick box on the left, could SELECT ALL to clear, even though it’s quite a common UI convention.

With another similar product finder within the system, this button is used to help agents remove all unused products. Quick overview - they’d have a list of 20 accommodations, 10 of those are part of an itinerary and another 4 are part of a paid itinerary and in use so the remaining 6 on the list are not used so they can clear all unused products so this button derived from that feature.

When it comes to THIS view, they will only add and remove products to check availability so my main goal was to make it efficient and quick. I hope this clears up any of your confusions.

Hey @zehir, great insights and I agree with most of them. To quickly recap some of your points:

Observation of the truth

I can’t agree more with this. I’m a firm believer that one should try and observe people in their most normal, relaxed state as they mindlessly use the system and one can immediately pick up frustrations. In this case, I had a working prototype and had a usability session with a task list, one of the tasks being: “Clear all the accommodations” - and its about a 50/50 split with people knowing to select all by using the tick box, others would simply delete 1 at a time. So that was my thinking to provide them with an easier and perhaps more clear way of doing that, obviously resulting in a few ways to delete products.

Useful or not

To continue on the previous point, this concept was not introduced because I thought it was a nice touch, I actually think that it could possibly make the process slightly more efficient. With that in mind, tracking of element usage is my next objective, this tool is quite new so there are a lot of things to still look into.

This debate came up in our team. Some of the BI’s and devs felt that there’s already a way of deleting by using the tick boxes but my main concern is that these people are tech savvy and know all the conventions but when working with the users, whether observing or testing, it’s clear that they don’t understand everything like our tech savvy people and to assume they do, well that’s partly the reason why so many platforms are functional and not effective.

Any thoughts?