[IxDA Discuss] Confirmation dialogs - the devil himself, or a necessary evil?

[Jim Drew]

On Jun 10, 2007, at 7:28 AM, Paul Nuschke wrote:

> I think that Cooper says in About Face or maybe "Inmates" that  
> these prompts
> are really there to hide flaws in the software and I think that is  
> a good
> guiding principle.
>
> However, I can think of at least two prompts which are pretty  
> useful. One of
> the most obvious prompts is the Yes/No/Cancel dialog that many apps  
> use when
> you make changes and don't save them before you attempt to exit. It  
> is far
> easier to ask before they leave if they want to save those changes  
> than when
> they return.

I though About  Face was pretty clear that this was one of the worst  
places to put that sort of an alert.  Why do we need to remind the  
user  to  save? Why can't  we just do the save for him?  (And stash a  
temp copy of the original file to revert back to if needed, tossing  
it when he closes the doc with its changes.) The only reason we  
"need" this alert is that we've always had it, so users are trained  
to think that they need to explicitly save and thus that if they  
don't save, their changes are reverted.


> Another useful prompt is when an action may take a long time
> and it is difficult to note that through the interface (this latter  
> prompt
> may be helpful initially but annoying later, so the user should be  
> able to
> disable it).

Wasn't this one  also pooh-poohed  there? If not, it should have  
been.  Don't tell the user "Hey, wait, we're  not  going to start  
this long long operation  yet, we're going to wait a  while  longer  
and slow you down more by simply telling you it will take a while --  
and not even let  you cancel." Have a status/progress indicator that  
gives that info instead.  And make the  application multi-threaded so  
as few action block the process as possible.

-- Jim