Going back should not erase what you typed
Our sign-up asks a new venue for its name, its kitchens, its opening hours and its first menu. Somebody gets three screens in, a call comes, the tab closes — and it was all gone. Now it is kept on their own device for a week, and the password never is.
Setting a venue up asks real questions. What is it called, how many kitchens are under the roof, who runs them, when are you open, what do you sell. It is not a form somebody fills in while waiting for a kettle; it is done between other jobs, and it gets interrupted.
Until this week, an interruption cost the lot. Close the tab, lose signal, hit back one screen too many — start again from the first question. The answers had never left the page.
Kept on the device, not sent to us
Everything typed is now saved on that phone or laptop as it is typed, and offered back for a week. Come back the next morning and the wizard resumes where it stopped, with a line at the top saying so in plain words: picked up where you left off, saved on this device, nothing sent to us yet — and a link to start again for the person who wants a clean sheet.
That sentence is doing a job. A half-finished form that silently repopulates is unsettling if you do not know where it came from, particularly when the questions are about your business. Saying where it is stored and that it has not been sent anywhere is the difference between a convenience and a surprise.
The one thing never kept
The password is not saved. Not obscured, not encoded — never written down at all, and blanked when everything else comes back. Convenience is not a reason to leave a credential lying in a browser on a shared laptop in an office behind a counter.
That is the whole rule, and it is the part worth copying if you build anything: save what would be annoying to retype, never save what would be dangerous to find.
Where this came from
It is one of a set of interface rules we were sent and have been working through — the plain expectations a phone user carries between apps without ever being told them. Pull a list down to refresh it. Swipe in from the left edge to go back. An X closes, an arrow goes back a screen. Never a blank screen while something loads. Ask for the camera when somebody touches the camera, not at the front door.
None of them are clever. All of them are invisible when present. Drafts that survive going back is simply the one that costs a real person the most when it is missing — and the only one where the fix is also a promise about what you do not keep.