Comments lost too easily

Double-click is a specific action of intent with regards to websites.

I don’t know how to ask this, so my apologize if this comes out rude. Are you using a accessibility friendly keyboard/input system?

No, not that I’m aware of. Everything is standard.

“Double-click is a specific action of intent with regards to websites.” I’m sorry, but I don’t know that that means.

Are you saying that, if you do what I describe above — double-clicking on some text — that it does not have the same result as clicking the Quick Edit link of that comment?

To re-emphasize, the real problem here is that there’s no alert or prompt to preserve a comment one is currently entering. I feel that violates the “principle of least surprise” for interface design (and results in lost effort — which is both surprising and frustrating).

What she means is that a double-click is generally taken to be “not an accident”. You might single-click something by mistake, but a double-click is a deliberate action. When you take a deliberate action, then moving the focus and undoing whatever you were previously doing is accepted as the norm.

If I’m in an email program, and I double-click on an email in a list, then hiding the list and showing me the email is normal. I don’t expect it to ask me if I want to stop looking at the list, I’ve just told it that I’m now focusing attention over somewhere else and don’t care about whatever I was previously looking at anymore.

If you’re entering a comment, then it’s expected that you’ll finish it before you double-click elsewhere. A single-click could be accidental, a double-click typically cannot.

You have a point about the escape key though. That could be a bit smarter.

Okay, I see what you’re saying. The “with regard to websites” threw me. In the sense you mean, a double-click is a specific action of intent with regard to pretty much everything.

Double-clicking plain text in a webpage does have a well-known expectation: It highlights the word that was double-clicked. It often puts the section mode into word- (rather than character-) selection. (It works exactly that way in this edit box I’m typing into.) That is exactly why I’ve double-clicked text: I wanted to highlight text for a copy-n-paste.

However, this should be a fairly benign behavior. In particular it should not silently discard an open form with input in it. I suspect if the double-click was not bound to the Quick Edit action, there would be no issue.

In your example of a list and one email on that list, you are not editing the list, merely viewing it. The change in focus doesn’t destroy the list or silently discard your input.

But the binding of double-click to Quick Edit is just an observation. I think the binding is a design mistake. You should allow the natural “highlight word” action that most expect (and which would not require the major change of focus).

The much more severe problem is not prompting the user before discarding input. The real issue here is not prompting the user about losing their input.

The double-click is just one way that happens. As I’ve indicated, it can happen other ways, so my request is primarily to prevent that lossage.