I'd like to give clear choices

Sunday, July 16. 2006

Good design shouldn't involve guessing game. None of the commenters (like he and she) of my previous post about scary dialog box know what will happen after clicking Yes without actually clicking on it, and so do I. If I were the programmer who designed that dialog, I'd pretty much like to give user 2 choices rather than asking users if they want to continue on something they don't know.

You do not have enough disk space on C:\ to proceed. You need 100MB.
[Select another drive] [Try some other time when you have enough disk space]

Do you have a better one? Note that you are only permitted to modify that particular dialog, not previous steps.

Posted by Steven Yong in computer at 08:03 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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No comment on this. But user friendliness should also come together with the proper functionality.

Just like when we are copying files from location A to location B in Windows, a message will show up if the destination drive is full. There are 2 choices, "RETRY" or "CANCEL". Cancel will just simply cancel the copy request, but what if we click on retry?

Any suggestion or workaround on this?

#1 Gary on 2006-07-16 17:41 (Reply)

Hey! I like that option.

I've seen this on certain apps but so far, one of the better HCI on UI, I've seen is on Linux systems.

I was working with Linux for a while (various flavours of it too..) and it still amazes me to this day that "some" (I have to emphasize on "some") of the apps are quite friendly and are able to anticipate "issues", giving you more options.

I did a double-take a few times to ensure that what choice I had was true and it did help a Linux newbie (at that time) to install certain apps on the system.

Microsoft has also gone the extra mile to improve the HCI on their UI and it is getting better too. So, by the time Vista finally launches, I'm expecting more user-friendly messages so that it doesn't scare the hell out of my parents when they can't print or when the network connection dies..

#2 Angie Tan (Homepage) on 2006-07-18 09:08 (Reply)

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