Well, sometimes software engineers can get really inventive. And when that happens usability goes down the drain.
Here is a one-of-a-kind dialog box, a monument of inventiveness:
A question on the dialog caption? On the dialog caption for heaven's shake???
People expect to see the program name on the caption, or something equivalent, and thus almost never look at what the caption says. So the average user is confronted with an answer but he can't see the question.
Needless to say this dialog box also demonstrates additional usability bugs:
- First of all it traps the user. There is no Cancel button for the poor user that is not certain about what to do.
- Second, YES/NO dialogs are the lazy programmer's way out when he needs feedback from the user. The dialog should really have a Disable and a Cancel button. However this means that the programmer must create a new dialog resource, a dialog class, etc, so most opt out and select a YES/NO question which is readily available through the Win32 MessageBox function.
Still, if you insist on using MessageBox, you can put your brains to work and structure the question in a way that it has a YES/NO answer.
"If you select YES such and such will happen ..." is plain silly.
Almost any question can be formed as follows:
The application can do blah blah...
Do you want to do that?
YES/NO/CANCEL
Have fun!
Dimitris Staikos
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