Motivation behind tiny X verses swipe to delete feed items?

Question probably for @hugo.

Today’s Testflight build adds the capability to remove informational feed entries but I’m not sure I agree with the interface to it.

What was the motivation for choosing this always visible X on the right side over the iOS standard swipe and tap to delete (or get more actions)?

For reference, here’s Mondo.

And here are the system messages and mail apps.


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Hi @RichardR that’s very good question, thanks :slight_smile:

The reason to use a “clear” pattern (aka “Notification Center”) instead of the classic delete pattern is multiple.

  1. We want to expose clearly in the UI that you can dismiss some stuff. Declines and card checks, by definition, are just notifications, you should read them, acknowledge what happened and clean them up. If we hide them under a swipe you’ll never know what’s deletable and what’s not (we’ll never let you delete a transaction, for obvious reasons).

  2. Every time an app let’s you delete stuff on a list view you can find a “Delete” button somewhere on the detail view as well. In our case the list view is the only point to make that action.

  3. If we use the Delete metaphor we need to give you some short of “Trash” or place to go to recover stuff. That make the whole thing far more complex than it should. “Clear” pattern implies that things that are cleared can’t be recovered, so it matches your expectations.

  4. We want to preserve swipe actions for stuff that can apply to every transaction and that are indeed part of the detail view actions (Flag as expenses, add receipt, etc.).

Does it make a bit more of sense now?

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That makes a lot of sense, especially the idea of them being treated as temporary, clearable notifications rather than actual transactions.

Though I may argue that swipe and clear is also used by Notification Center for individual items, the always visible X is only used for groups.

Thanks for responding. :thumbsup:

I really like this pattern (a lot!) - this is a great example of how a well designed banking interface can actually teach users more about how payments works.