Don't Default Destroy

Here's a little tidbit for UI designers: Don't default to destroying things. You'd think that would have been obvious, no?

No. VirtualBox is an excellent virtualization environment, one of the best in the world and possibly a contender for the top spot. But the default UI has a big UI fault.

VirtualBox, like most good VM technologies, lets you take "snapshots" of VMs that you can then restore, going back in time. Very, very handy for when you're about to do a tricky update and want to be able to roll it back.

In my case, the tricky update hard-crashed the box, which means I had to use the handy Machine | Close to terminate the VM. And lo! The Machine | Close dialog box has a handy tickbox for "Restore most recent snapshot". So I ticked the box, and it worked a treat. I went ahead and kept using the VM for several days.

Then something unrelated made the VM crash, and I did a quick Machine | Close. The next time I fired up the VM, something seemed wrong — files were missing, configuration changes I made a while back were undone, something was amiss!

You guessed it: The Machine | Close dialog box had remembered the "restore last snapshot" setting and so VirtualBox happily destroyed my data.

Should I have noticed the tickbox was ticked? Yes, but it's one UI element of about eight on that window, and the penalty for failing to notice it is unacceptably high. If I had just ticked the box, I could see not asking for confirmation — but not when the box was ticked by default.

Amazingly, this very thing was pointed out in a bug report, and the report was closed as "fixed" when they added the ability to have VMs override defaults if you explicitly set that up.

Um. Yeah. Because that addresses the usability problem. If you know you might make this mistake in the future, you can go update each and every VM you have to make it impossible to use that feature of the dialog box. And then remember to do it for all VMs you create in the future. All because some UI designer wants the purity of either remembering all the options on the dialog, or none of them. I don't think so.

So I've opened a new bug report on it. Hopefully they'll see this as the bug it is, but the point of this post is: Don't destroy things by default, you're likely to piss people off.