Yes Or No
“Yes Or No” is a great song by Wayne Shorter, but a lousy way to label dialog buttons. Unfortunately, I’m noticing more and more dialogs with buttons labeled this way. Examples from four different Apple applications:
Button names should correspond to the action the user performs when pressing the button—for example, Erase, Save, or Delete. The rightmost button in the dialog, the action button, is the button that confirms the alert message text. The action button is usually, but not always, the default button.
Apple Human Interface Guidelines: Dialogs
The Automator dialog deviates from another guideline:
Make sure to include both the main message text and the informative text. An alert with only message text is not a complete alert and typically is not very useful to the user.
Mine Are Better
Spot on Dan! I’ve been ranting on this one for a while… this used to be one of my favoured arguments for the subtle superiority of Apple’s usability, and their attention to detail, but that’s been slipping away in the OS X days.
I guess you keep hoping that they’re going to get around to it, but like many I’m starting to fear that this is becoming part of the culture at Apple; the argument that the UI focus is on ‘giving good demo’, rather than fundamental usability, consistency and attention to detail.
Or, to flip back to the optimistic view(!), that they’re encouraging experimentation between the teams, and when they settle on widgets and paradigms, they expose the new stuff to developers, much as they’ve been doing with new features across the OS releases, going from private to public APIs over time.
But ignoring their own guidelines, for no good reason, is very disappointing.
BTW - try reporting that problem for iTunes… you’ll be sent to their music request page, and then in circles, trying to give feedback on the app, back to the music page! Of course Mail doesn’t have a feedback link in the app, like other Apple apps, like Automator! : )
Good post. Agree with you 100%.