Design => Ideas => Message started by: pype on September 15, 2003, 04:06:33 AM
Title: Dialog Boxes: pros and cons
Post by: pype on September 15, 2003, 04:06:33 AM
| here comes this week's rant about classic UI designs. Dialog boxes. Seeing popping up windows asking me "are you sure you want to quit without saving ?" or "timeout while trying to connect to ..." is, imho, a productivity blocker. In most of the case, the question is repetitive, so will the user's answer be. What is the point from asking "are you sure you want to delete XYZ ?" if the user machinally replies "Yes", or worse, do not even take the time to read the message and click "yes" for every asked questions. I think that a 3rd generation OS should be able to provide operation status and report by some other way than popup boxes everywhere. On the other side, the Unix way of graving everything in log files is probably not very enjoyable as well: you need to be a system expert to notice something is going wrong and read the *right* logfile to learn what has gone wrong. Moreover, log files leave no room for user prompts. |
Title: Re:Dialog Boxes: pros and cons
Post by: BI lazy *yawn* on November 05, 2003, 04:34:16 AM
| Dialog Boxes ... In case of "are you sure" questions, they are something kinda awful, for one often knows, that he/she wants to do. The unix way is only to moan about error. If no response, requested operation has been executed. I like this approach. the dialog boxes aim at the otto normal user who sometimes clicks around the screen with his lousy mousy pointer and may cause severe damage to his filesystems - by erasing small unimportant files which reveal their importance upon the next start up. Any areyousureyouwannado? boxes are very welcome in such situations. they *might* wake up that otto normal user. the message boxes on the other hand, which are used to report events ... why the hell can't this stuff be dropped into some "report system events" window instead of bothering the users attention? there is no need to popup for a time out event. The user recognizes it anyway, coz he canna do what he wishes to. Stay safe |
Title: Re:Dialog Boxes: pros and cons
Post by: pype on November 06, 2003, 08:43:11 AM
Well, i would like to end with a system where the 'lousy mousy' user does not have the opportunity of doing any damage. But i admit that confirming sensible actions is important ... However, depending on who's interfacing the chair with the keyboard, the definition of 'sensible' may vary, and i'd like Clicker to be able to adapt this (or at least to be taught about this). For instance, we could have for Joe Average Code:
while Mr. Anykey would love to have: Code:
And Sarah Programatzi would rather have: Code:
That's exactly what i had in mind... The 'system tray' of Windows (and clones) partially fulfill this by the way of changing icons (i can visual notification of a flow has been denied by the firewall by looking at the red flashing arrow near the firewall icon), but i'd like to have file copies and "make all depend " progress ... Mozilla's download manager is almost what i'd like to have except that it should be "out of the window" ... some kind of Application Socket that would be called "report" and that would announce the operation progress, saying that Code:
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