Inkitecture

While I was sitting on the airplane tonight I watched a Railscast episode about adding session-based edit capabilities to a comment form. Put simply, it's a way to let users edit their comments for a brief period of time after they've posted them without requiring all the overhead of signing up, creating an account, etc. At the very end of the episode, Ryan Bates mentions looking at systems that you may have in your own web apps and evaluating how well you let users deal with and correct their own mistakes (I'm paraphrasing here, but you get the idea).

This really resonated with me - good user experience is something of a passion around here, so it's nice to see some love for UX, especially from the technical side of things. I started thinking of other places this sort of scenario comes up and the case that immediately came to mind was e-mail. I think most folks have had that moment of panic and the resulting dread after sending an email they didn't quite mean to. Maybe it was addressed to the wrong person (as in the classic reply vs. reply-all mistake), maybe you said something you didn't mean, maybe you forget to edit the subject (or didn't include a subject), or maybe you made an embarrassing typo that you didn't notice until after you hit send. Whatever the reason, wouldn't it be nice if you had a ten second buffer between when you hit send and when the message actually left the confines of your own computer, giving you a short window in which to cancel and correct your mistake? For me anyway, whenever this has happened, the realization of the mistake has been immediate, so the buffer need not be very long. From a user experience perspective, it needn't (and probably shouldn't, for that matter) be intrusive or attention-grabbing either. Just a simple pop-under or status bar type message with a countdown until the message is released from the queue and sent on its merry way would be perfect for me.

What do you folks think? Is this potentially useful, or just another annoying affordance for people like me who tend not to read their messages as thoroughly as they should before they hit send? Are there mail clients out there that do this already? Please, if you're willing, sound off in the comments. I'd be very interested to hear other perspectives on the same topic.

Last but not least, mad props to Ryan Bates of Railscasts - the screencasts he does are second to none. They've been a great influence over the course of my maturation as a Rails developer. Plus, they're free and there's a new one every week! What more could you ask for?