Error messages are the one area where the old mainframe systems got it right - if you entered something wrongly, a coloured message would appear at the bottom of the screen, yet your cursor was still in the same place, and you just had to carry on typing, rather than confirm the message and THEN get back to work.
I have re-created this way of working in the web apps I write, and find it so much nicer the way you can stay in ‘flow’.
Worth a thought.
notepad++ ftw!!!
I also whole heartedly agree with your using the web as an example of a dialogless environment that works.
The Firefox search model is great. When I had to choose a search interface for the e text editor ( a href="http://www.e-texteditor.com"http://www.e-texteditor.com/a ), it was the natural choice (slightly modified to also support replace).
I’ve been using Notepad++ for a while now, you should check it out:
Deleting files with the delete key in windows has to confirm deletion because 1) has said, most normal people don’t understand the recyle bin 2) the Del key is too easy to hit.
You do not get a confirm dialog if you drag files in the recycle bin.
On the Mac, delete files is mapped to Ctrl+Backspace, so it’s harder to hit by mistaken.
I do indeed want the Find window to tell me it’s found nothing, btw. I need the feedback.
Thanks for the very usefull tip David, but i still think VS sucks hard in comparison to XCode in many ways (though in some other ways, vice versa is also true) but the real workflow killer of the month, or year maybe? is that stupid little modal dialog that pops up every few minutes telling me that the updates have been installed and i need to restart my computer. Ofcourse the f#cker pops up just when i press enter on a line of code and the machine locks into reboot mode, vigorously closing all applications, which in turn triggers many more modal dialogs asking me to save or not. ofcourse, having to grab the mouse i get the pointer to the save button just in time to accidentally click the “terminate now” button in the “program not responding” dialog that pops up over the save button… that sort of thing really makes me want to hurt every last Microsoft engineer and UI designer on the planet.
Jef Raskin’s book The Humane Interface has good reading on this with some underlyign research, but it basically confirms your intution: Basically when a dialog box comes up so often it’s expected (like with search) it loses its value, but they do have some value when they actually appear unexpected and give a choice. He also proposed transparent nonmodal messages. It is too bad there aren’t more options in Windows that are as easy to use as a message box.
Hi,
full ack!
I wonder why so many people create so moronic dialogs…and why so many bloggers started to blog about them recently =)
Best regards
Tam Hanna
I personally think these dialogs are a complete waste of pixels and often are presented at the most inappropriate times. As an example, I can’t count the number of times when I am in “the productive zone” in Visual Studio or Word when all of a sudden something pops up and disappears. What was it? I haven’t a clue because I was typing and accidentally cleared the dialog. I hope it wasn’t trying to tell the world is coming to an end again.
One of the worst offenders is Trend Micro Internet Security. It has an annoying habit of announcing when it is downloading updates, scanning the computer, going to potty, whatever. I have canceled these actions so many times because the dialog pops up right on top of an application while I’m typing. It’s almost as if it’s saying, “I need to do something important on your computer. Would you mind getting out of my way for a few minutes?”
If you need to do something, just do it and change the icon in the taskbar or display a message in the status bar. Popping up a dialog to tell me no search results found is distracting. Ahem… the cursor not moving to search results is sufficient and “not found” in the status bar is more than enough.
If the situation is dire and I must be interrupted, throw up a dialog the size of France. Otherwise, stay out of my way and let me work. Status bars were created a reason… to give status updates without interfering with creativity or real work. Dialogs are the computer equivalent of an annoying telephone that won’t quit ringing: “Hi! It’s your annoying computer again. I thought you should know I don’t recognize the key you pressed.”
Hi Jeff,
I wholeheartedly agree with you on this. I am attempting to start a blog on Dialog Driven Software, which addresses interaction with a program in the form of a conversation between the user and the program. In the Notepad2 case, it’s like this…
des walks into store
Des: Hi, I’m looking for a book by Jeff Atwood
Store Attendant: Okay, is that case sensitive, and which direction should I start looking in?
Des: Em, no, and, eh downwards?
Store Attendant: Ok.
time passes
Store Attendant: I haven’t found it yet, I am going to start looking from the start
Des: Eh, ok.
Store Attendant: I haven’t found it in the current store. Are you sure you actually want this book?
It’s just bombarding the user/customer with statements that they don’t care about and questions they don’t understand the purpose of.
Anyways, if you’re interested in the video podcast, you can find it here:
http://www.minds.may.ie/~dez/serendipity/index.php?/categories/6-Usability-Reviews
Des
I agree that one of the biggest problem with dialog boxes (especially modal message boxes) is that they’re used way too often for everything under the sun. We tend to start ignoring them and they become noise, so we just click quickly to close them. I’m afraid we’re all too trained at this automatic behavior to ever go back to retain their usefulness. In an ideal world, they would have served their purpose quite well. We may need a new “alert” paradigm and make it clear to developers that it’s taboo to misuse it.
I actually like the deletion confirmation, mainly because many people still don’t “get” the recycle bin metaphor. Case in point – a PC neophyte friend of mine deleted a lot of very precious image files using a tool that does not display confirmation dialogs. She had no idea that she accidentally pressed the DELETE key after selecting several images. She called me up in a panic. She now knows what happened, and recovered from it herself after it happened again. This could have been avoided with a simple alert.
My main thought is that message boxes make sense for destructive actions, but the impact has been ruined by their overuse.
Using the status bar seems like a nice alternative on the surface, but I’ve seen studies (can’t recall exactly where) that show that most users COMPLETELY ignore the status bar. Maybe what we need is more animation, such as used in CodeRush, to call attention without interrupting flow…but then we can easily fall into “arcade game” application behavior.
I also MUCH prefer the use of descriptive buttons rather than OK / Cancel / Yes / No options. It’s amazing how few people can figure out how to word messages, and to match them up with either OK / Cancel -or- Yes / No. One of my biggest pet peeves is how many “professional” packages do this simple thing so horribly.
Dialog boxes are just about the most irritating things to any user - every single operation, however unimportant, requires an extra click - and by the time I have finished deleting three files from two dirctories permanently, even if those files (or even folders) are of zero size, I have had to confirm my intentions twice, and then go delete the files permanently !
I’m pretty sure it’s a CYA technique for Microsoft to display some of those stupid messages (such as “foo isn’t responding…”). It’s like those ridiculous warnings on some product packaging (“WARNING: Swallowing this knife can cause death”). If you don’t warn someone about the obvious, you risk a lawsuit.
I guess that as long as humans use software, we’re going to continue to see these types of ridiculous messages. We always end up paying for the ignorance of others.
Hmm, never seen that, I have seen a dialog with a progress bar giving the program 20 seconds to shutdown before it is terminated, but I guess it might depend om Windows version.
The reason they need to at least try and shut it down is because serious side effects may occur such as corruption of that programs files, take an encyption program for example, it could be pretty serious to just terminate it.
What i mostly hate about the security-type dialogs (excel macro warnings etc) is the absence of any useful information that might help me to decide what to do. So the Excel document contains macros?
What do they do? What are they called? One macro or a thousand? Who has written them? When are they triggerend?
Or the “this web page contains active content” warning i get in explorer – no hint
about whether its a piece of javascript or an activeX monstrosity.
Can’t believe nobody has mentioned this. You tell your computer to shut down, go home for the weekend, and come back to a box saying “foo isn’t responding. Want to end the task?”. Uh, ok.
First, I’m shutting the machine off, so why not just shut the program down?
Second, your box has been up there all weekend. How about timing out after, I dunno, 24 hours?
Third, sometimes it’s a laptop. Thank you for draining my battery telling me some program isn’t responding when I’m trying to shut the machine off.
Jeez microsoft, think about what your messages are doing.
Several people have commented here that dialogs are a symptom of having users of different abilities. Several have suggested that we need a new way of thinking to present messages.
We have managed, through the magic of most (all?) modern OS’s to get away from the hardware issues of being constrained by the ‘lowest common denominator’ hardware.
We need to do the same for users. Experienced users are consistently being constrained by the software companies producing software for ‘LCD Users’.
I propose one possible solution in my blog:
http://www.kebabshopblues.co.uk/2006/09/12/stopping-the-proceedings-for-idiocy/
I like some of the other suggestions noted here, especially the Firefox search ~ though I think we need to agree that until this type of interface is STANDARD (and part of the OS?) that search bar will NOT be noticed / understood by some users!
Nij
PS. A note for Debayan - use Shift + Delete to activate ‘permanent’ delete (ie not to recycle bin).
In a recently new site I develop, I put a delete button, that was so far from other controls, and so clearly labeled that I don’t put the classic “are you sure?” dialog.
Guess what? One user call to say if we can add a “are you sure?” dialog!!
I once worked in PC support - back in '86. We sent our HR dept on a word processing course, and on the first day back one of the chicks called and asked “There’s a box on the screen - I was trying to get out of the program. What should I do?”
“What does the ‘box’ say?”
“Do you wish to save your work. Then there’s a ‘Yes’ and a ‘No’”
“Do you want to save your work?” I asked
"Yes" Said she.
“Then which button do you think you should press?”
“Yes?” She asked tentatively.
This is extreme, but demonstrative of the fact that we are as children as a race in this new technology. Dialogs are a fact of life, and until familiarity with a computer is as common as familiarity with how to walk, talk, and know what people mean when they talk, they will stay. 50 years from now they will be unnecessary.
Red
The worst dialog boxes are in Peoplesoft applicaitons. I’m used to version 8.4 (web-based). Let’s say you’re working on some information in one page, then navigate to another page using a menu option. A dialog box opens saying “You haven’t saved your work. Press OK to go back to what you were working on, or Cancel to proceed.”
Everywhere else in the free world, pressing Cancel at this point would return you to where you last left off, and give you the option to save. In the Peoplesoft world, pressing Cancel continues you on your merry navigation path and you lose the work you might have meant to save.
All their windows suck.