I have seen many websites that detect if you've entered something into a field or touched some control and then try to switch away from the page. They then pop up a dialog box saying something like "you have unsaved changes, are you sure you want to leave?"
I always feel a bit uneasy with that pattern though. It kind of pushes the responsibility back to the user and adds friction, and it still doesn’t help when things go wrong accidentally (tab suspension, crashes, backgrounded apps).
Once that happens, there’s no warning and no signal that anything was lost.
Is that just something teams generally accept, or have you seen other ways people deal with it?
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I have seen many websites that detect if you've entered something into a field or touched some control and then try to switch away from the page. They then pop up a dialog box saying something like "you have unsaved changes, are you sure you want to leave?"
Yeah, I’ve seen that too.
I always feel a bit uneasy with that pattern though. It kind of pushes the responsibility back to the user and adds friction, and it still doesn’t help when things go wrong accidentally (tab suspension, crashes, backgrounded apps).
Once that happens, there’s no warning and no signal that anything was lost.
Is that just something teams generally accept, or have you seen other ways people deal with it?