Just cross posting something I wrote on the Adobe labs forum for the Photoshop CS3 beta. This subject is always creeping up again:

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I am seeing a lot of Yes/No button labels (when replacing a previous workspace for instance). It’s not good form to use those. It’s much quicker for users to assess an actionable term like “replace” on a button and act on it. “Yes / No buttons” require the user to read and understand the entire error message and then make the mental leap to agree or disagree with it, thus slow down the user interaction and make more room for error.

There was a story involving an euthanasia machine made by an Australian doctor connected to a Windows terminal, that drove the point home. After choosing cancel it would ask:

Are you sure you don’t want to kill yourself? Yes / No

Much more clear:

Are you sure you don’t want to kill yourself? I want to live / I want to die

Button placement can be a time sucker too: On Mac Os the default button is on the right, because people (exceptions for some languages) tend to read from left to right. They also scan the buttons left to right, so it makes the most sense to use the space on the right for the button most often used, instead of having to track back all the way to the left (a la Windows).

It would be great if you could avoid yes/no dialogs, use descriptive button labels and place the default button on the right.

It’s been a while since system 7, but a lot of these conventions now make as much sense as they did then.

Example of a bad dialogue, by the new Adobe Reader 8:

Thanks for listening,

Florian Fangohr

honest communications
for a better tomorr[oh]

http://fangohr.com

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this entry was posted on Sunday, December 17th, 2006 at 19.53 and is filed under computers, design, interfaces, web. you can follow any responses to this entry through the rss feed. you can leave a comment, or trackback from your site.