The Joomla!^® User Experience Portal

A recent post by Cory Webb on Twitter, twitter.com/#!/corywebb/status/167293349458489344, got me thinking seriously about the trash process.

Cory is spot on of course, to delete a trashed item it should not be necessary to select it again. 'Empty trash' should do just that. Of course, we still need the select options to restore items but to have to use them to delete an already deleted item is non-sensical.

However, once I started thinking about the trash process I realised it is actually a lot worse than that, and we have an opportunity to seriously improve the UX of the trash process.

Here's the scenario: I've been exploring various layout options while developing a site and I'm now cleaning things up before I send it over to my client. So, I don't want unpublished items or anyhting in the trash. I have a menu item pointing to a category blog that I no longer need. Currently my workflow would be:

1) Menu manager > select item > trash > filter: trashed items > select item > empty trash
2) Article manager > select item > trash > filter: trashed items > select item > empty trash
3) Category tab > select item > trash > filter: trashed items > select item > empty trash

Anyone else seeing the redundancy here? Aside from the select issue Cory highlighted, why have we got two trashcans? I believe most people would find the concept of a unified trashcan (as with any desktop OS) more sensible; who would want an 'image trash' a 'music trash' a 'folder trash'??

If we have a unified trashcan, and drop the extra select step the same cleanup process would have a workflow of;


1) Menu manager > select item > trash
2) Article manager > select item > trash
3) Category tab > select item > trash
4) Global trashcan > empty trash

This method would speed workflows and improve the logic behind the process, which I beleive would improve the UX of the trash process significantly.

+1
The current method is very counter-intuitive.
Who thought up the idea to have to select the filter to be able to empty trash. Nuts IMO.

actually the process is even more complicated. if you delete some articles and then select the status filter to all the empty trash option is not available. It is only available if the status filter is set to trashed only.

Yeah, exactly. You will only know how to do it if you have been told how to. Not many who figure that out naturally and being the first place/way they look for the trash manager.

In summary, what I would like to see is:

1) a global trash, e.g: site > trash
2) an additional delete button in the trash. 'Empty trash' deletes everything, 'Delete' permanently deletes checked items from the trash.

I think the most logical place to find the global trash manager would be under the 'Maintenance' menu item. Same place you find the 'Clear Cache' and 'Check-In'.

+1 Would love to have a global trash. Seems logical and intuitive to me.

Hey Seth,
Definitely agree with your idea about the trash.

Then again, compared to the ACL nightmare, trash works like a dream.

Thanks,
Matthew