Turnitin.com UI Woes: One-click, No-confirmation Deletion of QuickMark Sets

In general, I find Turnitin.com’s GradeMark function a time-saver, though the process of creating rubrics is tedious. Over the years, I’ve collected a big list of stock comments that I can drop into a paper easily.

Just now, I was re-alphabetizing those comments in order to make them more useful, when the screen started acting funny, and I wasn’t sure the buttons I was pushing were being recognized. The interface looked something like this, with buttons partly obscured:

I clicked what I thought was the cancel button (see a normal-looking screen shot, showing the panel in a normal condition)

…but it looks like in whatever mode I was in, the place where the “Cancel” button is overlaps perfectly with the “Delete Set” button (upper right, image below), which does not have a confirmation. So with one click, I totally erased a set of comments I had been building for years. I didn’t intend to click the delete button — I was trying to cancel, but the interface was screwed up. It’s very bad user interface practice to let a user delete something with one click, without a conformation box.

I am fairly confident that Turnitin.com will be able to restore that set for me from a backup, but it does mean that I’ll have to grade my current set of papers without the benefit of my carefully-curated set of comments. Deeply, deeply frustrating.

 

Post was last modified on 7 Nov 2011 12:36 am

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  • Hello,
    I'm an engineer at Turnitin and I'd be happy to help get this situation resolved for you. Can you please contact me directly at the supplied email address?

    I've already passed the UI feedback on to our UI team.

    Luke

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Dennis G. Jerz

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