I found this article interesting, exactly because "typing the name of the repo you want to make private before proceeding" seemed like a good solution to me as well. (Until now.)
However, I can absolutely imagine doing the author's mistake and I think their UI improvement suggestion is great.
To me the interface design lesson here is valuable. A recommendation to "check what repo you're in before taking destructive actions" has zero value, since everyone knows that already.
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Completely agreed on the second point though, it's weird to blame this mainly on GitHub.
It occurs to me that if your users are mindlessly doing repetitive things, no amount of "Are you sure?" or other hoop jumping is guaranteed to snap them out of it. Humans are pattern recognition machines.
GitHub may be better off preventing a repo with this size of a following from being made private without a support request or something requiring a second party to confirm.
Yes. Someone elsewhere in this thread suggested that it could be improved to make it impossible to make the repo private before you delete all the stars somewhere else in the UI, therefore breaking out of the pattern.
Surely there are multiple solutions, but I think you distilled the essence well: make the truly dangerous action different to the learned repetition.
At my company, we had like 3-4 steps, each with clear wording to cancel a subscription, and they had to type something in the end to confirm. Guess what? We still had tickets asking to restore their subscriptions :)
I was mesmerised how the Japanese train operators (and perhaps other similar workers) have to follow checklists where they physically point[0] at everything they are doing even when they are alone.
Now I'm wondering whether this approach actually works.
I think that's a different matter. Using checklists to automate a task, and make sure you don't skip any is working. Random obstacles before dangerous acts IMO make little to no use.
Before destroying a house a checklist can ensure that they checked if there are anyone in the building (i seriously have no idea how they do that), but requiring them to stand on one leg with pinched nose, I don't think that'd have any use.
However, I can absolutely imagine doing the author's mistake and I think their UI improvement suggestion is great.
To me the interface design lesson here is valuable. A recommendation to "check what repo you're in before taking destructive actions" has zero value, since everyone knows that already.
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Completely agreed on the second point though, it's weird to blame this mainly on GitHub.