The most anoying “dialog” (if you can call it that) is the information bar in IE 6-7. It often informs you that it did not completely load the page or an active X control for your protection, and asks permission before loading (good). However, it does not tell you what its blocking and/or trying to load (bad). Clicking the “more information” link simply takes you to the help section on the information bar. Grrrrr.
The thing is, it isn’t a perfect world. Decisions have to be made. Certain facts have to be presented. You should guide the user and also help them to understand. Yes, some dialog boxes are silly or unnecessary. But sometimes they are very informative and useful. Just because something is overused doesn’t mean it should always be avoided.
You’re making the argument for Emacs, aren’t you?!
Search for “Dialog Boxes: The Root of All Evil” in this page:
a href="http://www.cabochon.com/~stevey/blog-rants/effective-emacs.html"http://www.cabochon.com/~stevey/blog-rants/effective-emacs.html/a
Kris - The only thing that Visual Studio does right for searching is that they have a (hidden) incremental search. The shortcut is Ctrl-i (Ctrl-shift-i for backwards). Then type the text you want to search for. Pressing Ctrl-i again jumps to the next match, similar to emacs searching. (However, VS doesn’t seem to do case insensitive searches.)
David
The “Find” text search in firefox is superb! So is VS2005’s “Incremental Search”.
Every time I find myself in IE, notepad, etc, and I need to do a text search, I press CTRL+F, then have to type the word into the box, click next, click next… maddening! I usually go so far as to copy the url from IE, CLOSE IE, and open the page in firefox JUST FOR THE TEXT SEARCH!!!
I, too, hate dialog boxes. However, let’s not necessarily blame the programmer. I can’t count how many meetings I have had to sit through with a client who insists that a dialog box be put in place to inform the user that they are doing something stupid or irreversible. As much as I argue against it, even resorting to the truism, “but they won’t even read it”, it comes down to doing what the client asks for at some point.
the notepad dialogs I hate too, but I don’t know about the recycle bin.
most (all?) of those dialogs are based on actual studies from Microsoft on large groups of people that involve a lot more than computer savvy persons
of course, I would say, for “advanced” users like us, just make it configurable so we can get rid of it
So what you’re saying is: Dialog Boxes Considered Harmful?
Love this site. Anyway. Dialog boxes are usually ignored anyway and should be used when something really bad happens or unexpected, like say a nuclear meltdown. Status that just appears without interupting work flow seems a great approach and much appreciated. Google seems to have this down as well as Firefox.
I disagree. Although many of the sentiments are well and true, the actual examples provided fail to convince. Here is what I mean:
Example 1: Sure…if I don’t have any control over whether it starts again, why tell me. If I could Cancel, then this would be useful. I’m with you here.
Example 2: This is a valuable dialog. How often do you click a button and nothing happens. Did it work? Did it fail? Did it crash? Should I click it again? Maybe if I try anther word? Oh, it worked. OK, so I try again. Hmm. I guess it didn’t find it.
Example 3: Delete confirmation. People ALWAYS toss stuff into the trash without meaning to. You’re dragging crap around and trying to squeeze it in beside another document and doink…straight into the trash. And recoverable? Sure…but to the typical user? There is a reason so many users never empty their trash. They THINK that once it goes in it never comes out. So recoverable, yes…for a user who knows what they are doing…but for Joe/Mary User using her work computer a warning is really very helpful.
If you remove those dialogs in Notepad2 then a majority of people will get confused and not be able to work out what happened. And when you have a situation where you can’t remove modal dialogs because people will be confused, you really need to rethink how that compenent works. My personal favourite is something like Firefox.
You could always download the source and remove those dialogs from the codepath.
The Windows dialog boxes are often nothing more than liability transfers more than information. Infected? Hey, you chose to run the code.
Not that it tells you what will be run, how much code is there, or anything else remotely useful - it’s just there so that MS can wash its hands of the responsibility for their products. Shameful.
I think one of the reasons Windows warns a user that they’re sending something to the recycle bin is because a percentage of users still do not understand the metaphor.
Windows (and OSX) would likely benefit from testing a graphical enhancement to throwing things away by animating the icon representing the file being deleted moving to the recycle bin (essentially making delete the “drag-and-drop to the trash” key).
Generally speaking though, dialog boxes suck big time. (OSX’s sheets are a VAST improvement as they connect the box to the application.) The issue of interrupting the flow of work for little reason should be understood by now.
I personally believe it disrespects the user by demanding her/his attention. Very few tasks should ever steal focus or modally disrupt the previous task.
Completely agree here. One of the things that might contribute to this is that message boxes are super easy to create. So given the choice between some custom logging solution and calling MessageBox.Show, the latter wins out.
To me the biggest problem with modal dialogs is that they want to steal the focus from the task at hand. As a high speed touch typist, I can’t count the number of system modal dialogs that I either agreed with or dismissed by hitting “Y”, “N” or the space-bar while typing something quickly at the exact moment some program wanted to tell me something urgent.
If it is important, isn’t it important enough to not just start sucking up random keystrokes? x
I have to agree with Mitch Marcus on this one - it’s the fault of whoever makes the GUI toolkits. It’s easy to do MessageBox.Show(), but there’s no easy way to do NonModalNotification.Show(). If Windows Forms came with that sort of thing, you’d see new apps behaving much better about this. While Microsoft was wasting time making windows transparent in Vista, they could have been improving UI for years to come simply by updating the tools they make available.
Love these blogs, keep 'em coming.
I generally agree with the points made here, although I personally like getting feedback that the operation has completed. What might be better is the same text (search not found) but in the status bar instead of a dialog box.
Another alternative would be the option to disable these alerts.
Ben Hollis - Non-modal dialogs in the traditional form aren’t the solution. Removing modal dialogs requires, as I said before, a reworking of the whole concept, which often comes up with completely different concepts.
Hi,
sorry, but the suciest dialog award goes to an unknown Palm OS image viewer(dont want a lawsuit).
http://tamspalm.tamoggemon.com/2006/08/31/the-most-annoying-dialog/
When you rename a file, regardless if itm works out or fails, you get a similar looking dialog box!
People can be dumb…
Best regards
Tam Hanna