Question

I have an app out that involves keeping track of information over time. Part of the app is a reset button. In order to avoid accidental resets, I made that button respond only to long-clicks. However, that approach confused about 20% of my new users, who thought that the reset button must not be working.

Is there a more intuitive (and standard) way to protect a button from accidental presses? (If not, I can add some sort of custom message to the button I have . . . )

Answer 1

A Thilo said, a confirmation dialog is the standard answer.

This is good reading if you haven’t already:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/03/the-opposite-of-fitts-law.html

Basically, make it small! Long click is a good answer, but unless there’s a “press and hold” label right underneath that, users are going to have trouble – that violates the user model, since users aren’t used to having to do that (I probably wouldn’t be able to figure it out).

On the iPhone it’s fairly standard to have “slide” buttons (like the unlock) for operations like this, since it’s much more difficult to accidentally slide. You could implement something similar to that, but it might be overkill for this problem.