A recent post in the Language Log blog (see Resources for a link) got me thinking about the many questions computers ask us. Often, the question is simple enough: "Are you sure you want to delete that file?" with answers like "Yes" and "No." That's pretty good. A yes/no question with yes/no answers.

But then, one day, someone ran up against a problem. If you had an open document with unsaved changes, and you were quitting the program in which the document was being edited, you might want it saved, or you might not want it saved ... or you might not want to quit at all, because you hadn't realized that you had an open document with unsaved changes.

Enter the trichotomy: "Yes," "No," or "Cancel." Not many users are confused, but there are people out there who think "Cancel" will cancel the save of their file, so they're afraid to click it. Of course, it cancels the program-quit instruction.

Yes, no, or DELETE ALL FILES?

Many systems try to develop a clear standard, such as "dialog boxes should always offer 'Yes' and 'No' as choices," or, similarly, "dialog boxes should always offer 'OK' and 'Cancel' as choices." But a new school of thought suggests that the buttons should be more specific, so you don't get in the habit of always clicking "OK." The Apple Human Interface Guidelines (see Resources) advocate these principles, as do the guidelines for the KDE and GNOME user interfaces.

Here, then, is Apple's Mail application asking about a program update. (This is the dialog box that prompted the Language Log post I mentioned above.)

"Mail has been updated. Do you want to allow the new version to access the same keychain items (such as passwords) as the previous version? This change is permanent and affects all keychain items used by Mail."

Now, if dialog supplied you with the options "Yes" and "No," you could answer the question easily. If it had the answers "OK" and "Cancel," you could answer it. But the answers actually offered are "Change All" and "Don't Change." That's unanswerable. Does "Change" mean "change access to allow new version," or does it mean "change from having access to not having access?" My speculation is that "Change All" is the "Yes" answer, and a quick visit to the Apple support forums confirms this; it also confirms that regular users were confused.

The problem here is not that the buttons should have been labeled "Yes" and "No"; the problem is that the question should have been asked correctly. One plausible wording might have been:

"Mail has been updated. Do you want to change access on keychain items (such as passwords) to allow the new version access?"

Better, I think, would be to admit that "change" is not a good description of the concept, and use another verb:

"Mail has been updated. Do you want to allow the new program access to keychain items (such as passwords) that the previous version had access to?"

Here, the buttons could be labeled "Allow" and "Deny," and no one would have been at all confused.

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This happens too much

In many cases, it seems that software developers just aren't paying attention to their dialog boxes. A popular humor Web site aimed at developers, called the Daily WTF (see Resources), offers an almost weekly collection of hilariously inept dialog boxes. Some of them are from actual Web sites, with my favorite being a query asking, "How well did this answer your question?" The answers available were "Yes" and "No."

It is hard sometimes to figure out exactly what causes these. I have generally assumed that what happens is that a question is written, answers are phrased for that question, and the question is then rewritten and the answers aren't updated. The developers are so familiar with the system that they don't need to read the text to know which button to hit, so they never notice.

In times of yore, back when everything was just "Yes" and "No," the emphasis was always on making the "Yes" or "OK" option the safest, because that was what users were gradually trained to click without reading the messages. To this day, the world is full of messages that are obviously wrong; worse, there are messages that aren't even wrong, but just incoherent. The selection of meaningful imperative verbs for buttons helps, but it only helps so much; you can still, as demonstrated above, pick verbs that don't communicate at all to the user.

The problem is not restricted to things structured as dialog boxes; online help can be absolutely terrifying in its incoherence. How many more times must we search the documentation for, say, an explanation of a numeric field labeled "Gronk," only to be told that it "adjusts the amount of Gronk?" Among the worst offenders here are PC BIOS vendors, who for some reason think it's perfectly reasonable to offer a pop-up menu of choices, using (or even misusing) jargon terms for each of several options, with no documentation beyond "selects the mode of the controller."

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Ways to improve language use

One of the first things you should do is just have new users try a system out, and make sure that they see all the help and dialog boxes. Don't be too quick to declare that a misunderstanding is "user error." If users make a particular mistake fairly often, your choice of words is probably poor. A friend of mine has a wonderful story from the early days of the Macintosh. His mother put a disk in the machine and got a message along the lines of, "This is not a Macintosh disk. Would you like to initialize it?" So, since this seemed to be the way to access the disk, she clicked "OK." Weeks of work, gone. Oops.

Note that a better choice of buttons alone wouldn't fix this; even if the button had been labeled "Initialize," she might well have clicked it. A better choice of words, such as "Erase," might have helped; but just think of the poor technical support people explaining why this disk -- fresh from the store, which I haven't put anything on! -- needs to be erased.

Clarity is important. Inexplicably, programmers who are otherwise quite obviously capable of precision in describing exactly what they want a computer to do in a dozen programming languages often cannot manage to describe clearly what it is about to do when using English.

One trend that I suspect may be at issue (and it's hardly unique to computers) is a tendency for people to become incoherent when they try to talk real pretty. Someone somewhere decided that "erase" was too mundane a word, and wanted to say "initialize." It's more technical-sounding; it conjures images of men in white lab coats slaving away at delicate machinery. It's also confusing to a casual user. Just say what you mean, please! I can accept that my computer will not always address me with the vocabulary of a graduate student of modern poetry; I would like, however, for the words it uses to be used correctly.

Also, please try to minimize negation. Even fairly smart and well-read people get turned around horribly by questions like, "Would you like to prevent the system from rejecting unauthorized connections?" Just ask, "Would you like to accept unauthorized connections?"; it's clearer. George Orwell asked people to consider this sentence: "A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field." The example is meant primarily to draw attention to the "not un-" formation, but applies to nearly all excessive use of negatives. "The disk you have inserted is not uninitialized. Would you like to..." Yuck.

This week's action item: Find a program with a lot of little icons you can't figure out. Try hovering the mouse over them, or otherwise asking the system what they do. Is it any clearer now? Probably not.

Resources

Learn

• If you can answer this, you're not paying attention: Review the Language Log as it deconstructs a confusing dialog box.
  
  
• The Daily WTF: Visit this site that continues to astound and amaze.
  
  
• Wikipedia's entry on dialog boxes: Get some pointers on other usage questions.
  
  
• Apple's current dialog box guidelines: Explore Apple's guidelines for the modern era.
  
  
• Apple's current guidelines for writing dialog box text: See how the guidelines have evolved. In an earlier version, these guidelines used the name "Blackmail Stuff" for the hypothetical full disk. Note that the "Blackmail Stuff" disk has been replaced with the less interesting "Work Stuff."
  
  
• The cranky user columns: Read any of the earlier articles in this column.
  
  
• developerWorks technical events and webcasts: Stay current with jam-packed technical sessions that shorten your learning curve, and improve the quality and results of your most difficult software projects.
  
  

Get products and technologies

• Free downloads and learning resources: Improve your work with articles, tutorials, and downloads from the developerWorks Web Architecture zone.
  
  

Discuss

• Participate in the discussion forum.
  
  
• developerWorks blogs: Get involved in the developerWorks community!
  
  

About the author

Peter Seebach keeps trying to write about "dialogue boxes," but has never been able to break into the theatre industry. He would be really happy if he never saw another dialog box with an obvious typo in it.

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Table of contents

• Yes, no, or DELETE ALL FILES?
• This happens too much
• Ways to improve language use
• Resources
• About the author
• Comments