Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

  • Hacker News
  • 1. LibreOffice's recover files dialogue series of steps is frustrating like this.

    2. Still better than "Yes, Ask me Later" dialogues that are so insulting to users.

  • An active "yes/no/cancel" prompt is a paragon of usability compared to the modern standard of constant yes, except for when it fails with a silent no.
  • (A)bort? (R)etry? (F)ail?
  • It's actually more than yes/no/cancel. There's also a red X. I only know from experience that it's usually the same as cancel, but not always.
  • This is largely the consequence of the Windows API having a built in option to use these buttons, without having an option for custom text. It would be a lot more work to build a custom window with custom buttons than just callong this API.

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/...

  • My favorite is apps that offer a way to cancel a long-running operation, where clicking "cancel" on the confirm dialog cancels the cancellation.
  • One of the most influential books I ever read was About Face by Alan Cooper. What he said about this bad modal dialogue is that you should simply not ask the user, and let them undo later.

    This was heresy at the time, but turned out to be the native user flow for iOS later on. And now it's common in web apps.

    https://www.amazon.com/dp/1118766571?lv=shuf&channelId=500&p...

  • I’ve always loved how TextEdit’s “don’t save” button is actually a red button that says “delete” for unsaved text files.

    There’s no ambiguity there. The user is very well-informed that they’re about to quit and lose the document they were working on.

Explore Birbla archives

Yes/No/Cancel causes Aspirin sales to soar (2007) · Birbla