One of the most influential books I ever read was About Face by Alan Cooper. What he said about this bad modal dialogue is that you should simply not ask the user, and let them undo later.
This was heresy at the time, but turned out to be the native user flow for iOS later on. And now it's common in web apps.
Remember in 1990 (the pictures are from around then) there wasn't unlimited fast disk space. There was a good chance you were saving to a floppy disk which not only was slow, but might not be in the drive all the time. At least in 1990 you could assume a hard drive - but you couldn't safely assume there was enough free space on the drive to save anything, since 40mb drives filled fast.
35 years latter we live in a different world where you can assume an unlimited fast data connection to a data center. Saving and allowing undo is possible today.
Rip John C. Dvorak, writer of the Abort/Retry/Fail column from PC Magazine.
On a different note, never underestimate the value of a modal dialog that gives you a chance to retry an IO operation that failed. Loose USB cables and network shares over Wifi can make those happen a lot more often.
For a site about usability, I was going to gripe about the tiny font, low contrast, and unresponsive layout until I saw that. It does look more suitable at 1024x768.
I’ve always loved how TextEdit’s “don’t save” button is actually a red button that says “delete” for unsaved text files.
There’s no ambiguity there. The user is very well-informed that they’re about to quit and lose the document they were working on.
My favorite is apps that offer a way to cancel a long-running operation, where clicking "cancel" on the confirm dialog cancels the cancellation.
One of the most influential books I ever read was About Face by Alan Cooper. What he said about this bad modal dialogue is that you should simply not ask the user, and let them undo later.
This was heresy at the time, but turned out to be the native user flow for iOS later on. And now it's common in web apps.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1118766571?lv=shuf&channelId=500&p...
Remember in 1990 (the pictures are from around then) there wasn't unlimited fast disk space. There was a good chance you were saving to a floppy disk which not only was slow, but might not be in the drive all the time. At least in 1990 you could assume a hard drive - but you couldn't safely assume there was enough free space on the drive to save anything, since 40mb drives filled fast.
35 years latter we live in a different world where you can assume an unlimited fast data connection to a data center. Saving and allowing undo is possible today.
In the world of 2TB SSD’s, it does seem silly to risk inadvertently deleting an important ~2kb word document.
An active "yes/no/cancel" prompt is a paragon of usability compared to the modern standard of constant yes, except for when it fails with a silent no.
I thought this was going to be about a marketing success example for Aspirin! ... Although, I guess in a roundabout way it was.
(A)bort? (R)etry? (F)ail?
Rip John C. Dvorak, writer of the Abort/Retry/Fail column from PC Magazine.
On a different note, never underestimate the value of a modal dialog that gives you a chance to retry an IO operation that failed. Loose USB cables and network shares over Wifi can make those happen a lot more often.
And it came from the days of floppy disks, so we often needed the chance to put the correct disk back in the right drive!
(2007)
For a site about usability, I was going to gripe about the tiny font, low contrast, and unresponsive layout until I saw that. It does look more suitable at 1024x768.
Good year
Every year was better before 2020!