Bad Dialog Design Epidemiology
Button names should correspond to the action the user performs when pressing the button—for example, Erase, Save, or Delete.
Apple Human Interface Guidelines: The Elements of an Alert
This guideline was first widely flouted by iTunes:
“Ignore” and “Download Upgrade”
“Keep Existing Link” and “Change Link”
“Ignore” and “Download Upgrade”
“Cancel” and “Locate File…”
“Edit Rules…” and “Save Playlist”. Also, the Smart Playlist editing dialog calls them “rules”, not “conditions”.
“Continue Import” and “Quit”
“Cancel” and “Quit”
Also of note is that only one of these dialogs uses a bold-faced summary sentence at the top and standard weight explanatory text below, another HIG recommendation.
This dialog button labeling convention has spread to other Mac applications:
“Cancel” and “Delete Group”
“Cancel” and “Erase Junk”
“Check Manually” and “Check Automatically”
This one I consider an oversight on my part because I was involved in the interaction design of Sparkle!
If I had to suggest improved labels, they would be “Cancel” and “Open All”, but I really don’t think this dialog should exist at all.
“Use Existing” and “Set as Default”
Now it’s leaking to the web!
“End Slideshow” and “Repeat”
Stop the madness!
Could iTunes problems stem from its also being a Windows app, thus drawing on developers less familiar with the Apple dialogue conventions.
FWIW, we’re working on flushing out the ambiguous “Yes/No” dialogs in time for Camino 1.1. Not sure how those snuck in…
That sparkle screenshot looks like it actually is from sparkle+ (http://ironcoder.org/blog/category/sparkleplus/), so you might not be involved in its (mis)design afterall!
That is a shot from Sparkle Plus. I’ve added a new bug about the labels. Hopefully we can get this fixed soon.
I did check however and Sparkle does uses Yes/No as well.
Thanks for the post.
itunes was an macintosh application years before the windows version.
the “engine” was even bought from an old macintosh specialized company.
Have the iTunes team seen this post yet? Maybe they would consider correcting the mistakes once they saw how many instances of the issue there were.
I do agree with you that the more explicit buttons would be better.
There aren’t any really bad examples here like ‘Select “Yes” to delete and “No” to save.’ At least most of these dialogs ask a yes or no question, sometimes in the heading. Those mis-matches are much worse. They are often the result of hard coded standard windows dialogs that allow the developer to choose yes/no, ok/cancel, etc. but unique button names require a custom dialog.