Five usability problems with the uninstall tab

I have been wondering about this one myself a while back.
The idea behind putting the modules that can be disabled on a separate pages forces you to think about your actions.
You can not accidentally click 'uninstall' and hit 'Next/Do it'. People tend to do it a lot without actually being aware of their action.

There is nothing in the way of deleting a module without disabling it first. However if you would put all the modules you can uninstall on a single page, the page gets cluttered. Also it adds a layer that makes sure you can't uninstall by accident.

However, if we want to simply and take for granted that people might click 'do it' too easily i would suggest the following:
-create a uninstall button per module.
-onclick show a warning message (jQuery box) or show a confirmation page with a clear message that data can/will be lost and the action cannot be undone.
-execute the action, when the action is confirmed
-show success/fail page and offer an undo option (see below).

Perhaps it might be an idea to offer a sort of undo option. Since the actual module files remain on the server you can actually quite easily reinstall the module, except you will need to find a way to restore the data.
You could write a sort of backup script that stores the data in a compressed file that can be used when reinstalling the module.

tagging…

Please attach screenshots of ideas, avoid adding anything to the module administration page.

This certainly doesn't fully address all the above problems, but possibly provides a slight usability improvement, which doesn't affect the module administration page... I simply reworded the uninstall page help text, and included a link to the module administration page to make it clear where you actually need to go to disable a module prior to uninstalling (the 'list' tab is not an obvious place to click at all).

Attached are two attempts at making the uninstall page help text a little more helpful.

+1 for the second .png: Although this makes sense to some extent from a developer's perspective (but not really either), it is weird to call uninstalling a feature. I would omit "which you can" and go with: ...disabled on the module administration page.

Could we use a confirmation page when disabling a module? The way I think of it working is:

User unchecks an installed module and clicks "Save Configuration"

User is then asked if they wish to keep the data for the modules which have an uninstall function. I see a series of checkboxes, which are selected by default.

Unchecking a checkbox means that data will be deleted (module uninstalled). Leaving the checkbox checked means the module is simply disabled.

(This still doesn't answer what to do with the uninstall page in case someone wants to come back later to uninstall a module they earlier disabled. Maybe the text on the confirmation page could reference the uninstall page and mention that if they don't uninstall now, they can do so later)

mrfelton : If you can, create a new issue with that patch, it should go in easily. Patch 1, that is.

I couldn't find a new issue that was opened, so I created a new issue #473012: Improve help text on uninstall modules page for mrfelton's first patch. I also went with the 1st patch, because sometimes less help text that says the same thing is better for usability.

The original issue proposed here still isn't addressed, so setting back to active.

The original issue is basically a duplicate of #277513: Make uninstallation of modules more obvious and intuitive, so I'm marking it as such. I've added a reference to this thread on that other issue.