Comments on: Bad Dialog Design Epidemiology

By: Gary

Gary — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:16:29 +0000

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.

By: Kroc Camen

Kroc Camen — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 19:39:55 +0000

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.

By: michel

michel — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 22:11:15 +0000

itunes was an macintosh application years before the windows version.

the “engine” was even bought from an old macintosh specialized company.

By: Mike Zornek

Mike Zornek — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 20:55:31 +0000

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.

By: Duncan

Duncan — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 09:30:44 +0000

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!

By: stridey

stridey — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 02:15:32 +0000

FWIW, we’re working on flushing out the ambiguous “Yes/No” dialogs in time for Camino 1.1. Not sure how those snuck in…

By: Carl

Carl — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 02:04:37 +0000

Could iTunes problems stem from its also being a Windows app, thus drawing on developers less familiar with the Apple dialogue conventions.