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

[shaunbergmann at gmail.com]

In general, I also agree that in most cases they are insulting and at
least annoying, if not stupid.  However, to answer your question, I
can think of situations where they may indeed be a necessary evil.

When working with touchpanel interfaces that control various physical
subsystems of an automation system for example, a single button push
may result in a drastic system wide change in state.  For example: a
'Vacation Mode' button may trigger a series of events including
locking out certain gates, shutting down pool systems, activating
security partitions in remote locations, opening the gates on the
moat etc.

You, the end user, better be darned sure that you REALLY wanted to do
this.  There will not be a simple 'undo' presented to you, and what
you are about to launch could take 2 or 3 minutes to complete.

A less severe situation could be something more benign like turning
off your home theatre system.  The simple 'power off' button again
triggers a series of events, and it's entirely possible that the
equipment requires a cooldown period before it can be turned on
again.  Not quite releasing the hounds, but still extremely annoying
if you %u2018accidentally%u2019 touched the %u2018home%u2019 then
%u2018power off%u2019 button when picking up the touchpanel from the
sofa.

There are two solutions that I can see: 

1. The devil incarnate: the Confirmation Dialog.
2. Obfuscation of button location (better hiding the ejector seat
lever)

To abolish the confirmation dialog box in this case (%u201CAre you
SURE you want to release the hounds?  Yes / No) you are forced to
increase the cognitive / motion steps required to achieve the desired
result.  You%u2019ve possibly made it difficult now for a new user to
figure out how to %u2018just turn the darned thing off%u2019.  

Human error is always lurking, so of the two options, how to better
protect the user from an undesired result?




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Posted from the new ixda.org
http://beta.ixda.org/discuss?post=17129