Jeff Atwood hates dialogue boxes: “Every time you send your users to an alert dialog, you have failed them. In a perfect world, we should never see a single alert dialog. Ever.” Check out his post, then let’s discuss :)
I mostly agree, but not completely. Some situations, like save/abandon changes on document close, warrant modal dialogs. Of course, there are alternatives to most of these situations, like automatically saving a changed copy and leaving the original intact or embedding both versions in the same file, but that’s not expected behavior and moves the problem to opening the file. It can can create other problems… let’s say you’re a designer, working on a massive image for a large poster, and you accidentally close the document. Autosave in that situation will likely cost you upwards of five minutes (its own, far worse form of modality) while it prepares to save, embeds the changes, and writes the file, whose size is about to increase significantly. Not good, IMO.
But neither are the examples posted in the article. A modal dialog for reaching the end of the document? Are these people serious? I’ve seen My First Web App stuff that’s better than that, with UIs designed by programmers!
hey Nicolai.
yep, I was pretty much thinking what you were thinking. There are times when the penalty that you pay for doing something dumb is great enough that there *should* be a barrier (such as a modal dialog) to stop you from doing something dumb accidentally that you’ll really suffer from.
I was thinking recently that I almost wanted a dialog box to check if I wanted to close a tab in Firefox because in the new version I was accidentally closing tabs so often (which doesn’t seem like a big disaster, but until I learned otherwise, I often thought that the site I was going to read later was now pretty much lost … which was an irretrievable loss).
Actually… I don’t think that I’ve ever been bothered as much by overuse of dialog boxes as I have by their absence.
I mostly agree, but not completely. Some situations, like save/abandon changes on document close, warrant modal dialogs. Of course, there are alternatives to most of these situations, like automatically saving a changed copy and leaving the original intact or embedding both versions in the same file, but that’s not expected behavior and moves the problem to opening the file. It can can create other problems… let’s say you’re a designer, working on a massive image for a large poster, and you accidentally close the document. Autosave in that situation will likely cost you upwards of five minutes (its own, far worse form of modality) while it prepares to save, embeds the changes, and writes the file, whose size is about to increase significantly. Not good, IMO.
But neither are the examples posted in the article. A modal dialog for reaching the end of the document? Are these people serious? I’ve seen My First Web App stuff that’s better than that, with UIs designed by programmers!
hey Nicolai.
yep, I was pretty much thinking what you were thinking. There are times when the penalty that you pay for doing something dumb is great enough that there *should* be a barrier (such as a modal dialog) to stop you from doing something dumb accidentally that you’ll really suffer from.
I was thinking recently that I almost wanted a dialog box to check if I wanted to close a tab in Firefox because in the new version I was accidentally closing tabs so often (which doesn’t seem like a big disaster, but until I learned otherwise, I often thought that the site I was going to read later was now pretty much lost … which was an irretrievable loss).
Actually… I don’t think that I’ve ever been bothered as much by overuse of dialog boxes as I have by their absence.