Re: [Usability] Friendly words from an application

[Kalle Vahlman <kalle vahlman gmail com>]

On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 15:38:03 +0000 (GMT), Alan Horkan
<horkana maths tcd ie> wrote:
> 
> I was pretty sure the Guidelines recommended against "Friendly Words" and
> getting carried away with politeness or saying please and thank you all
> over the place.

Of course. I still feel awkward whenever sudo (or was it su?)
apologizes to me in finnish. But I was actually referring to some part
of the HIG that recommends using positive expressions instead of
negative. Unless it was somewhere else, I could be wrong of course.
 
> Asking a users if they really want to leave seems like a patronising
> question to me, why else would they have hit the Exit/Quit/Leave button?
>
> If the application was smart enough to save the current information and
> not lose anything it should be able to quit safely without needing to ask
> for confirmation before doing so.

Oh, sure. Never ever did I mean to imply a quit confirmation dialog to
be a good thing _unless_ the user is in risk of losing data by closing
the app.

I was merely pointing out that I wasn't annoyed by the dialog as much
as the typical quit confirmation alert, because the program actually
trusted me to know better than itself. Something that is quite
annoying in applications if not easily overridden.

-- 
Kalle Vahlman, zuh iki fi