Re: [Usability]HIG should advise against Yes/No in confirmation alerts

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Mon, 2003-04-28 at 11:24, John Levon wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 28, 2003 at 06:07:05AM -0500, Gregory Merchan wrote:
> 
> > It's here:
> >   http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/draft_hig/windows.html#alert-button-order
> 
> Ooops, so it is, looking closer. Apologies.
> 
> > 1) Some alerts have only an OK button and it should be labelled "OK".
> >    No imperative verb is appropriate. Especially inappropriate is Close,
> 
> Right.
> 
> > There's another thing that should not be done which the HIG doesn't admonish
> > against. The phrase "Are you sure?" should not be used. Actually, I can't
> > think of any kind of alert that should be phrased as a question.
> 
> Not sure what you mean by this. What would your preferred "unsaved
> changes" on close dialog look like ?

The HIG does cover this (last time I read thru it, anyways, which wasn't
long ago) - you should _never_ say "we should do this action, is that
ok?", but instead state "there is this condition/state, what do you want
to do?" and put the actions in the buttons.

So instead of, "You have unsaved changes, save them now? 
[Cancel][No][Yes]"
You'd have, "You have unsaved changes.  [Quit][Cancel][Save]" or
something.

The reasoning is pretty good.  The problem is that the meaning of Yes
and No is wholly dependent on the way the question is phrased.  If you
have "You have unsaved changes, save first? [Yes][No]" in one app, and
"You have unsaved changes, quit anyway? [Yes][No]" in another, the user
is going to end up losing data, because the first app trained the user
to think in an opposite way than the other app expects.

> 
> regards
> john
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