Plurality in user messages

Solution 1:

You can avoid all of this messy plurality by just deleting the items without any message and giving the user a really good Undo facility. Users never read anything. You should build a good Undo facility as part of your program anyway.

You actually get 2 benefits when you createe a comprehensive Undo facility. The first benefit makes the user's life easier by allowing him/her to reverse mistakes and minimise reading. The second benefit is that your app is reflecting real life by allowing the reversal of non-trivial workflow (not just mistakes).

I once wrote an app without using a single dialog or confirmation message. It took some serious thinking and was significantly harder to implement than using confirmation-type messages. But the end result was rather nice to use according to its end-users.

Solution 2:

If there is ever any chance, no matter how small, that this app will need to be translated to other languages then both are wrong. The correct way of doing this is:

string message = ( noofitemsselected==1 ?
  "You have selected " + noofitemsselected + " item. Are you sure you want to delete it?":
  "You have selected " + noofitemsselected + " items. Are you sure you want to delete them?"
);

This is because different languages handle plurality differently. Some like Malay don't even have syntactic plurals so the strings would generally be identical. Separating the two strings makes it easier to support other languages later on.

Otherwise if this app is meant to be consumed by the general public and is supposed to be user friendly then the second method is preferable. Sorry but I don't really know a shorter way of doing this.

If this app is meant to be consumed only internally by your company then do the shortcut "item(s)" thing. You don't really have to impress anybody when writing enterprisy code. But I'd advise against doing this for publicly consumed app because this gives the impression that the programmer is lazy and thus lower their opinion of the quality of the app. Trust me, small things like this matter.

Solution 3:

How about just:

string message = "Are you sure you want to delete " + noofitemsselected + " item(s)?"

That way, you eliminate the number agreement difficulties, and end up with an even shorter, more to-the-point error message for the user as a bonus. We all know users don't read error messages anyway. The shorter they are, the more likely they are to at least glance at the text.

Or, armed with this knowledge that users don't read error messages, you could approach this a different way. Skip the confirmation message altogether, and just provide an undo feature that Just Works, regardless of what was deleted. Most users are already accustomed to undoing an operation when they notice it was not what they wanted, and are likely to find this behavior more natural than having to deal with another annoying pop-up.