in reply to Avoiding a second click

You have gotten some good answers, but the most obvious, and the recommended first measure wasn't mentioned:

Tell your users to not click twice.

If you just put a little text saying "this will take a litle while, please do not click more than once on this button", you will get rid of 90% of the problem, or more.

You still should have some kind of fallback in the code, as suggested and shown, but this is where you start.

I also don't really know what you mean with "nor to use more cookies", especially the word "more" confuses me. If you can set some cookies (which the word implies), there is no hindrance at all for you to add more, is there?

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Re: Re: Avoiding a second click
by vagnerr (Prior) on Jun 12, 2002 at 09:51 UTC
    It's a lovely idea but I'm afraid you overestimate the intelligence of some web users. I used to work for a company that provided the Credit Card processing for other companies. And one of the big problems we had was with users pressing the submit button more than once. Yes even with something as important as their own money they would ignore explicit instructions to be patient and not submit their credit card multiple times. I kind of felt we should treat it as a idiot tax but we had to protect the customers from themselves :-)

    ---If it doesn't fit use a bigger hammer
[reply]
      I have to second this... Same experience with my customers... In fact, in one case my customer clicked the submit button as fast as he could just to prove the system could be broken. Ended up setting a hidden form value on the page and if that variable was set, we would display an alert box saying "Don't do that!"

      ----
      Zak
      "There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism" ~ Theodore Roosevelt (1915)
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Re: Re: Avoiding a second click
by agentv (Friar) on Jun 13, 2002 at 00:20 UTC
    ...I agree with this wholeheartedly.

    Not because it will solve all of the problems. (gratuitous and predictable posts predicting the idiocy of most humanity except for us omitted here for brevity.) But it is true that many people may click twice because they aren't sure if their clicks registered. If you warn them that there might be a delay, those people who can read will exhibit more patience.

    You should still implement other technical solutions (several shown here will work nicely), but you can cut down on a lot of the problems with a simple message to your users. Some of them will see it and they are the ones who deserve to be helped the most anyway.

    It's okay to abandon the "us and them" mentality that many programmers and developers exhibit. The people who use our stuff are really part of "us" too. Talk to them instead of trying to be incredibly tricky and saving them from themselves silently. (On the other hand, a safety net is a good idea. And a lot of people won't listen to you when you talk to them. But you take reasonable measures to protect this latter category and then don't worry about them too much.)

    ---v

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