Reword user cancellation form buttons

The word "cancel" is used throughout Drupal to stop an action before it's complete. As that's not what's happening with "cancel account," I think the word cancel should be replaced there with something more descriptive, maybe "delete."

Suggestions:

Change text for "Cancel account" button to: "Confirm account cancellation", or

Change text for "Cancel" button to: "Abort"

Its too late to not use the "cancel" terminology.

I confirm this is a problem that can generate confusion, we've received such a complaint from a product owner.

I think the "Abort" replacement makes totally sense but let's see what the Usability Team has to say.

Here's a patch and I tidied-up the IS.

I agree, this makes a lot of sense.

@borisson_, thank you! Then let's RTBC :)

I'm not sure if needs a review from a usability expert, but if it doesn't - I've set this to RTBC.

I agree with #1.

Everywhere else in Drupal, we "Delete" things: nodes, views, date formats, etc. etc. etc. We don't "cancel" them. Or we disable them, which you can do with Views, for example.

Everywhere else in Drupal, we use the word Cancel to mean "Abort this action".

Nowhere else in Drupal do we have a combined "Cancel" action that would either delete or disable the thing. Cancel never made sense to me in the first place. Until I looked at the PNG of the confirmation screen, I didn't even really know that it meant "either delete or disable".

So why do we use the terminology of "Cancel" for user accounts in the first place? That is the source of this confusion, and changing the button wording to be more wordy doesn't make sense to me. Let's just call it delete when we are deleting user accounts, and disable when we're disabling them, and make it two separate actions.

Thanks for that input, @jhodgdon.

Agreeing with the above: At other places we only use "Cancel" to abort an action, and as far as I know "Cancel" is never displayed as a primary button. So having Cancel as a primary button to actually do an action is confusing.

As visible in the screenshot, there are different actions that can be done to the user account: either disabling them (they stay in the database, but are not active) or deleting them (removing them from the database). Depending on how the site is configured the user might not see all four of these options.
If the primary button where labeled "Delete" that would also be confusing if a user has just ticked on of the options to "Disable account.." because they don't want to delete the account.
We use "Disable" for views - but that would also be confusing, if the user really wants to delete an account.

I can see two patterns that we could use:

• "Apply" because that's what we use at other places where users choose an action first, but that needs checking how that looks like if users cannot choose different actions.
• "Remove" because that's what we use at the Blocks layout page. This could apply to all four actions that can be chosen here.

I think the Block Layout page is another good example to look at. There are two possible things you can do to cause a block in the layout not to be shown:
- Remove -- that will delete the block's layout config -- calling it delete would be confusing though, because the block itself still exists (whether it's a content block or a built-in block or from a view or whatever)
- Disable -- that will put the block's layout config into the Disabled section at the bottom, so it could be re-enabled later.
These are two separate actions in the Actions drop-down for each block layout item. Not combined into "Cancel".

Then Views, again you have "Delete" and "Disable" as two separate actions in the drop-down.

Then Menus, you have a checkbox for "Enable" (which you can uncheck to disable a menu item), vs. if you are editing a menu item, you can delete it.

So Users are the odd one out. In the Bulk Operations list, there are:
- Block the selected users
- Cancel the selected user accounts

Confusingly, if I choose the Cancel option, and then on the confirm screen I say I actually want to Disable the account, the action is, as far as I can tell, the same as Block -- the user account shows up as Blocked after I chose Disable. ???!???

I'm going to go ahead and say this is bad UI. It is inconsistent with itself as well as with other places in Drupal that allow you to disable things.

To make matters more complicated: "Cancel" is already introduced on the user account page itself, where for most other entities it says "Delete".

I agree about the terminology, although I'm going to speculate there's been at least one lengthly discussion elsewhere in an effort to pick an all-encompassing term for everything from deleting accounts and content, to moving the content elsewhere, or not really deleting anything but just deactivating the account for a bit - in its favour, 'cancel' is at least simple and short.

EDIT: Here we are - #8: Let users cancel their accounts (eight) - it seems to have at least partly evolved from the user's perspective.

(#121) After in-depth discussion with a few members of the UX team, we decided that "Cancel (your) account" is the proper way to call this. Likewise, we have "cancel account methods", user_delete() becomes user_cancel(), and hook_user_delete() becomes hook_user_cancel().

"Cancel" (for accounts) is also used in other places of course, e.g.

• the routing "/user/123/cancel"
• "Action" dropdown on /admin/people
• permissions - "Cancel own user account"

I think "Cancel / Abort" on the confirmation screen is better than "Cancel / Cancel", but also nobody has yet floated the idea of just quietly dropping the second button entirely?

As an aside, I find it a bit annoying the way that if you start on /admin/people, '?destination=/admin/people' gets appended to the address, so that if you then Edit a user and click Cancel account, and then click 'Cancel' (as in abort), you're sent back to /admin/people rather than the user page you were previously viewing.

“Abort” can have a similar meaning to “Cancel” in the UK. People may click “Abort” to try and abort the action.

I propose just using “Apply changes” and “Cancel”

I’ve updated the patch accordingly.

“Apply changes” definitely feels more like an affirmative action than “Cancel account(s)” which means “abort” no longer required.

Oh - and really should go against 8.6.x

@rachel_norfolk thanks very much for the suggestion and the patch, any chance you could update the issue description with your proposal and maybe a screenshot?

From looking at the patch, we'll have a form that references 'When cancelling these accounts' and has buttons for 'Apply changes' and 'Cancel', correct?

Good point Steven - done.

And that’s what happens when you assume your changes are so simple you don’t need to test locally. Oops. Sorting...

The title of that page also has a mismatch with the text now. The title is "Are you sure you want to cancel these accounts?", I think that should also be disable now.

Not sure we can change the text to Disable At the moment - sometimes, it’s to disable an account, sometimes cancel, sometimes delete.

If I understand the test failures properly, I needed to change a few test builds. New patch uploaded. Sorry, run-tests.sh not working on my setup right now.

1. Fixed the test failure.
2. The wording of 'Cancel accounts' is still relevant, since this is used on the Action label on admin/people and as the 'Delete' link text on user/{user}/edit. Only when used in combination with a 'cancel' as in 'abort' button on the confirmation page, things start to get confusing. I suggest we wait for the outcome of the UX review before doing another iteration.

This looks good to me. I have one remark but it is totally fine like it is, and it is not necessary to change the patch.

@@ -557,9 +558,10 @@ public function testMassUserCancelByAdmin() {
     $this->assertText(t('When cancelling these accounts'), 'Allows to select account cancellation method.');
     $this->assertText(t('Require email confirmation to cancel account'), 'Allows to send confirmation mail.');
     $this->assertText(t('Notify user when account is canceled'), 'Allows to send notification mail.');
+    $this->assertSession()->buttonExists('Apply changes');
 
     // Confirm deletion.
-    $this->drupalPostForm(NULL, NULL, t('Cancel accounts'));
+    $this->drupalPostForm(NULL, NULL, t('Apply changes'));
     $status = TRUE;
     foreach ($users as $account) {
       $status = $status && (strpos($this->getTextContent(), $account->getUsername() . ' has been deleted.') !== FALSE);

It is not necessary to assert that the "Apply changed" button exists since in the next step the button will be pressed to submit the form anyway.

I'm unclear on the status of this ticket right now. I would set it to RTBC but it still needs approval from the UX team. I'll leave it in "Needs review" for now.

Discussed at UX meeting on 5 June.

The scope of this issue is to rename the buttons to avoid the duplication of "Cancel". Changing the page title to avoid any confusion between the "Cancel" in the title and on the button, has in turn knock-on effect on other pages where we refer to "Canceling an account". Adding this to this issue will extend its scope, so therefore there is a separate issue to deal with that #2977573: Reword "Cancelling" of user accounts.

Looking at this issue, I also noticed that a user canceling their own account don't have an idea whether their data is really deleted. So we need to look into that in another issue #2978063: Give information to user whether account is disabled or deleted when cancelled

So I would say this issue is RTBC, but deployment might need to wait for the broader rewording issue.

Closed #3075488: Change button text to "Don't Cancel Account" from "Cancel" as a duplicate issue.

Reroll of #31

Fixed \Drupal\Tests\user\Functional\UserSubAdminTest test assertion.

Tested via patch #31 and its working fine on drupal 9.1 as well
'Cancel account' text is now 'Apply changes'

Hi @tanubansal - can you test with the latest patch #40?

Hi @rachel_norfolk - tested via latest patch #40. Its showing 'Apply changes' button text
This can be moved to RTBC

Thanks

Actually changing status based on #45

I tried to apply the patch to 9.1.x and it no longer applies.

@tanubansal, thanks for making the screenshots. It is also a good idea to update the issue summary with the latest screenshots so that there is a before screenshot and after screenshot. Cheers.

Here I have added reroll of patch #40 on Drupal 9.1.x.

@ravi.shankar, please add an interdiff or a diff if that fails.

issue has been fixed.
Interdiff needs to be added
After proper code review this can be moved to RTBC

Tested patch on local, working as expected. Cancel accounts is now replaced with Apply changes. Attaching screenshots and interdiff for #40 and #48 as well.

Um... Sorry to break in at this point, but the word "cancel" still appears twice on this page with two different meanings.

At the top of the page, it says "Are you sure you want to cancel the account"
At the bottom of the page is a "Cancel" button, which has the meaning of "don't cancel the user account".

To me, this is still very confusing.

My suggestion would be to choose a different word other than "cancel" for the action of deleting/disabling a user account. Cancel doesn't even make sense to me at all, actually... We use "cancel" all over the UI for "close this form and don't do anything". Using it to mean "either deleting or disabling/blocking a user account" doesn't really make sense to me.

So we are looking for a word that would cover both types of action: the deleting and the disabling of an account - and we should come up with that wording before we make a patch with it.

This wording then needs to be used at the about 6 places where it says "cancel" with the exception of the actual "Cancel" button:

• Are you sure you want to cancel this user account?
• When canceling these account
• Require email confirmation to cancel account
• When enabled, the user must confirm the account cancellation via email.
• Select the method to cancel the account above.
• The "Cancel account" button
• The "Cancel account" link on the account edit page.
• Cancel the selected user account(s) on the "People" admin page.

One option would be to use "delete/disable" where it says "cancel" - but that's very cumbersome because it's used so often.

Another option would be to use "remove". Removing an account could mean deleting the account but it could also mean disabling: removing it from view of others.

We also use "remove" on the block layout page to describes the action of deleting the instance of that block from that layout without actually deleting the block. So we already have an example of using "Remove" where delete isn't quite appropriate.

Tested patch on local and it's working fine. Cancel accounts is now replaced with Apply changes. Attaching screenshots and interdiff for #40 and #48 as well.

After Applying Patch #48 successfully reword the cancel button to Apply changes sharing screenshot

Thank you for all of the input on this issue.

The problems identified in this issue are currently being looked at during Drupal Usability Meetings, we have been iterating on #3199972: Improve user interface text on the account cancellation screen which will address these problems (among others).

The discussion as to what to renamed the "Cancel account" button to was discussed at #3200771: Drupal Usability Meeting 2021-03-05 (see [#3199972-11 for the details) and as a group we unanimously opted for changing the button label to "Confirm". The option of "Apply changes" was not mentioned, however personally I feel "Confirm" is a better choice of words because: the options are not simply applying recoverable changes, generally the user is taking an unrecoverable action and this screen is simply to ask them what choice the action and them to confirm that they would like to proceed.

Additionally, during the meeting, an idea was raised to have the label of the primary action button change dynamically depending on which of the four options was chosen. The idea being that if either the first or second option was chosen the label could read "Disable", whereas if either the third or fourth option was chosen the label could read "Delete". It was agreed that this should be explored in a follow-up issue.

With that all in mind, given that #3199972: Improve user interface text on the account cancellation screen is addressing these issues and is also being actively iterated on at Drupal Usability Meetings, I'm going to mark this issue as a duplicate of that issue.