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Comments on User preferences behaviour inconsistent with advice

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User preferences behaviour inconsistent with advice

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A preferences problem highlighted in an answer on Software Development Meta appears to have been somewhat fixed, but leaving an inconsistency with the guidance on the preferences page.

At the top of the user preferences page there is a note that says:

Changes are automatically saved once you move away from the input field.

This might lead a user to believe that closing the tab without moving away from the input field would lead to no change being saved. However, this is not the case. If the tab is closed, the change to the field is still saved.

To reproduce:

  1. Go to the question list page: https://meta.codidact.com/categories/3
  2. Make a note of a tag on a question in the list, and whether it is highlighted in yellow or not.
  3. Go to the user preferences page: https://meta.codidact.com/users/me/preferences
  4. In the "Favorite tags" field, add or remove the tag (depending on whether it is already present), but do not move away from the input field
  5. Close the tab
  6. Go to the question list page again
  7. Notice that the tag has now changed from being highlighted/not to the opposite
  8. Go to the user preferences page again
  9. Notice that the "Favorite tags" field reflects the change you made

Solution

The behaviour and the guidance need to be consistent, but which one should be changed?

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1 comment thread

But you did "move away" (3 comments)
But you did "move away"
Karl Knechtel‭ wrote about 1 year ago

This seems to be a consequence of the browser's semantics differing from the ones intended in context. Presumably, the real rule is that the field contents get saved when it loses focus, which would also happen when the tab (or even the entire window, or browser) is closed directly. I imagine it would be difficult (and, frankly, needless) to distinguish these cases in the client-side code. In general I would prefer a feature that saves and restores in too many cases rather than too few. If we do change something it should be the description; but I've seen many other things work this way in web apps.

trichoplax‭ wrote about 1 year ago

Yes I agree that technically the field lost focus, but it could be clearer to the user (especially for nontechnical users).

trichoplax‭ wrote about 1 year ago

If we did decide to discard changes if the field is still in focus then there are events in JavaScript for leaving a page so it should be possible.

I don't have a strong preference on whether we change the behaviour or the wording, as long as they are consistent and unambiguous.