May 14

Negotiate with your users

Posted by Bryan Clark
Filed under mozilla | 9 Comments

I always advocate against simple (and especially modal) dialogs in user interfaces because they aren’t there to help the user get past the problem, more like work through the emotional issues the software is having.

Dialogs aren’t the real evil, though they usually aren’t great, it’s the lack of real negotiation.  In the book Getting to Yes it states that you “Make emotions explicit and acknowledge them as legitimate…”, however don’t stop there.

Acknowledge Me!

A useful dialog would negotiate with your users.  Give them actions and power to change their situation.  Don’t ask users to acknowledge your troubles and stop the negotiation there.  Reconnect!  Try Again!  Even simple actions can help people correct the situation.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 10:46 am and is filed under mozilla. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

9 Responses to “Negotiate with your users”

  1. Erik Snoeijs on May 14th, 2009 at 2:35 pm

    I agree 100%, nothing is more frustrating than a application stating the obvious, while asking me to confirm this obvious statement.
    Yes, telling me you can’t connect is fine, but don’t also ask me to tell you it is OK.

  2. Fred on May 14th, 2009 at 6:15 pm

    Very Good…

    “Don’t ask users to acknowledge your troubles and stop the negotiation there. Reconnect! Try Again! Even simple actions can help people correct the situation.”

    It should be mandatory that this statement be pasted to every programmers screen.

  3. Novack on May 14th, 2009 at 6:39 pm

    Yes, indeed. That phrase is brilliant, and should be a mantra.

  4. Jan Nieuwenhuizen on May 15th, 2009 at 12:15 am

    And what about information? “Try again” could me much more useful if you give
    the user a fair chance at finding out what really happened. The command,
    the error message, the log file, etc?

  5. Jakub Steiner on May 15th, 2009 at 1:10 am

    Jan, why stop there?

    http://xkcd.com/416/ :)

  6. Xav on May 15th, 2009 at 1:37 am

    Bad example: here the application should just notify the user that the connection failed and attempt to fix it all by itself, exactly as in the xkcd strip Jakub pointed (but maybe not as far:)

  7. Kris Walker on May 15th, 2009 at 8:00 am

    And at the very least you can try to lighten up the situation:
    http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001238.html

  8. James John Malcolm on May 15th, 2009 at 11:55 am

    Pretty much all dialogs in Thunderbird should be non-modal. Like the “Failed to connect to server pop.gmail.com” one – which I get 3x if I’m disconnected as I have 3 accounts. It’s hell.

    Dialogs like those should be more like the Firefox 3 “Do you want to save this password” non-modal dialog, but in yellow or something like that.

  9. Andreas on October 14th, 2009 at 5:00 am

    I totally agree. Bad dialog boxes are found in abundance in almost all types of software. It needs to be addressed! Thanks!

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