The addition of an alert confirmation box goes a long way on the front end of deletion. It gives users a chance to think twice about deleting a user, and to cancel the operation if they’re dissatisfied or concerned. But that’s only half of the equation; not only do you need to make sure deletion is the intent, but then you need to make sure that deletion was accomplished.

Obviously, for you the programmer, you’ve written code, you’ve run the code, you may have even gone back to the database and done your own manual SELECT to ensure that results were deleted in delete_user.php. And, of course, the user is gone in show_users.php. But that’s from a programmer’s point of view.

For a user, that’s not enough. Just as she’ll often want to confirm a deletion before the deletion goes through, she usually wants to know—beyond any shadow of doubt—that the deletion has gone through. So that means at the end of the process, she gets some sort of message that confirms what’s just gone on. So your flow should look something like this: