Samples must be labeled and clearable in one action
Aliases: sample badge · dismiss samples · one-click clear demo
What it is
Fake rows used to show shape must do two jobs at once: look obviously not mine, and go away in one action. Labeling is a visible “sample” badge, watermark, or separate zone; clearing is one action aimed at the whole sample set, not row-by-row delete. Without labels, display impersonates real data. Without one-click clear, people pay production-delete labor to remove teaching props. This entry does not cover how starter templates differ from user work. It only covers how demo records get recognized and sent away.
Why it happens
List controls treat every row as a user object: clickable, searchable, openable. If samples share that look, the classifier fails and people treat fakes with the caution due to real data—afraid to delete, afraid to try destructive actions—so the learning value of the display drops. Labels rewrite the category onto each row and the whole region, excludable in a glance. Clearing must be wholesale, because a sample is a set of scenery, not five independent scraps. Row-by-row delete makes people think they are doing data hygiene; they stop halfway, the scenery is broken, and both the shape demo and the real data suffer. One-click clear should also return to a first-use zero-data empty, not to “you deleted everything”—for someone who never had real records, clearing samples ends a demo, it does not destroy work.
Where it stops holding
Read-only demo environments (sales projection, docs screenshots) can skip clear, but labels must still be on, or screenshots leak into real workspaces as truth. If a sample is bound to legally required seed data (a system-admin row that must remain), that row is not a sample: keep it out of “clear samples” and split it in copy. On phones, a one-tap clear with high mis-tap cost may use one confirm, but the confirm is “remove demo content,” not “delete 12 selected records.”
Applying it
- Badge every sample row and the sample container with an unmissable “sample / demo” mark, the same set in list, detail, and search.
- Provide a container-level “remove sample data” that drops the whole set and returns to first-use zero-data empty, not ordinary bulk delete.
- Clearing samples must not require multi-select, and must not land in a trash mixed with real records.
- Verify: ask someone to point at which rows are theirs, then to remove samples without selecting rows one by one. Failed pointing or a delete workflow means labels or clear are missing.