I deleted my Twitter account!
I accidentally deleted my Twitter account last week. Yes, yes, I know—that’s like accidentally driving one’s car off the road or misplacing one’s pants. So how did I do it? Glad you asked.
Like many folks, I manage more than one Twitter account. For example, I have my personal Twitter account, a business account for Tuitive, and then a couple extra accounts related to some side projects. I mistakenly thought I was logged in as one of these extra accounts when I made my way to Twitter’s account deactivation screen, as shown here:
Notice anything telling in the above screenshot? I didn’t either, and that’s the problem! While this screen does a great job of describing the dire, irreversible nature of deactivating a Twitter account, there is no indication anywhere as towhich account I am logged into and about to deactivate. I assumed incorrectly and pushed the button.
I was pretty shocked when I realized I had deactivated my personal Twitter account. To add insult to injury, Twitter would not let me create a new account using my previous username or email address, meaning it wasn’t really deleted. It was just caught in some sort of Twitter purgatory, stuck between the world of the active account and that of the deleted damned.
Fortunately after a few days of pleading-via-email, Twitter support had mercy on me and restored my account. (It came with a polite admonition, however, that this was a one-time favor.)
So, happy ending. Crisis averted. Problem solved. But what a waste of time and energy, both on my part and that of Charles at Twitter support. Here’s a super simple usability tweak to the HTML on the Twitter account deactivation screen that I’m sure would have prevented this issue from happening in the first place:
The best part is, in the time it has taken for you to read this, a Twitter developer could have implemented this and perhaps prevented another careless fool like me from making a similar mistake.
Like many usability tweaks, simple changes have huge impacts that can prevent a lot of heartache. And we all know that an ounce of prevention is worth pounds of tech support.
blog comments powered by Disqus
