Empty field
Gesture does not arm. Nothing to lose, nothing to resist.
Empty field01 / 05
Nevermind: A gesture-based interaction to clear large texts.
A scrub gesture that makes erasing feel as natural as
crossing something out on paper.
“Nevermind” started from a simple frustration: deleting text on mobile is graceless. Hunting for a small x, holding Delete while characters crawl away, triple-tapping and hoping the selection lands.
Every other common gesture has a physical equivalent. Swipe to delete. Pinch to zoom. Pull to refresh. Erasing text has none.
“Nevermind” is an attempt to give text deletion a gesture that maps to something your hands already know: erasing. No holding Delete. No precision targeting.
Before the design process, try it first.
This interaction is best experienced on a phone. Touch input and haptic feedback are central to how it works — most of that is lost on a laptop. Scan to open on your device.
The threshold scales with text length. Short text clears in one swipe. A paragraph needs sustained scrubbing.
Formula: threshold = clamp(text.length × 8px, min: 70px, max: 900px)
There's no progress bar. Haptics and audio carry that job — telling you how close you are without anything appearing on screen.
A 3ms buzz fires on a repeating timer while the finger moves. The interval compresses as progress builds: interval = 90ms − (progress × 45ms).
Gesture does not arm. Nothing to lose, nothing to resist.
Tap focuses. Drag wipes. A 10px buffer separates the two before any logic runs.
First tap focuses. Second interaction can wipe. Prevents accidental clears while scrolling.
e.preventDefault() fires once isWiping is true. Normal scroll preserved before that threshold.
isCleared gates all wipe logic. Only Restore is available until the field is repopulated.
Swipe left or right on the active card.
The most important decisions were subtractive. Textures, blur effects, etc were removed because they didn't add any value and added performance load. The strongest version turned out to be the simplest one.
This could have easily been a two-minute LinkedIn concept, but I felt the interaction design process deserved deeper exploration. We rarely see the thinking behind the small interactions we use every day. I believe "Nevermind" has the potential to become one of those memorable, iconic interactions if executed thoughtfully.
Testing revealed a few recurring concerns:
The good news is that these challenges are solvable. I've already addressed a significant portion of them, and they'll be the focus of my next iteration.