[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by supermighty

This option looks scary. It wasn't clear to me when I first looked that it only would remove the books _if_ I pressed the Remove button.

Originally Posted by haertig

I can see where the confusion comes in then. If you are in the "one year" part that is checked, and there is no "remove" button displayed, it is perfectly logical to assume that this setting is not an option, but a mandatory removal.

How are you supposed to know whether "remove" button is missing because it is enforced removal, vs. missing because you have no content over one year old? No way for users to know, especially with a new feature. It is perfectly logical to assume the missing button means "mandatory removal". Poor design of this feature by Amazon. The button should always be there, but if you click it and there's actually nothing to remove, then you should be told that at the time. Hiding the button when there's nothing to remove is certainly not helping users in understanding this new feature.

I think this is a problem for computer application users that has been getting worse. It is getting harder when encountering an application for the first time to know whether a button (or other UI element) is going to have an immediate effect or lead to more choices. Various hints for this have been around for multiple decades, but programmers, or more likely their bosses, frequently can't bring themselves to use them, especially not consistently, even in the same application or on the same screen.