As someone who mostly browses on my ipad, it’s really easy to accidentally bookmark a paragraph while scrolling. It’s not a big problem, just a little annoying and I thought I’d say something.
Actually, the scrolling itself should not trigger a bookmark, just when you touch a paragraph without actually sliding the screen.
Of course that can happen easily, and it happened to me, too. Still, as a bookmark is easily removed and moving a bookmark to the touched paragraph is usually not such a bad thing, I figured that I could live with it.
To add a dialog before actually changing the bookmark seemed to be a much worse idea. And a click delay (like you have to hold the finger on a paragraph for a second) would work, but it would be quite counter-intuitive, so it would hardly be ever used.
Still, I’m open to any input!
The one thing I could think of is allowing the user to debookmark by touching the paragraph again. There might be more intuitive ways for touch devices if you can make the difference tied to the type of device that’s browing. Maybe a double tap. That might work for pc’s too.
A double tap could be done, but it’s the same as with the hold-for-a-second variant: Unless you know it’s there, you’ll never use it. My take is that people will more or less set the bookmark by accident, which helps to learn about its existance.
What I was thinking about is to delete a bookmark automatically once a user scrolled to a story’s end or he’s rating the story.
What exactly bothers you about accidently setting a bookmark? That you have to remove it manually? Or that the actucal intended bookmark is moved by accident?
I don’t really use the bookmarks but if I were to use them, I wouldn’t want them to be filled with random bookmarks that I collected over the years. I create them without noticing and then my bookmarks list slowly fills with stuff I don’t want. Often times it happens when I’m just skimming a story. Then if I do it and notice and want to delete it I have to scroll to the top and click on the bookmark button. Then scroll back down to where I was reading.
It’s a mild inconvenience and it doesn’t bother me that much. But, I thought I’d let you know.