chrisjk
Feb 2nd, 2001, 08:18 PM
I was shocked to find this in MSDN...
Sometimes it seems as if many dialog boxes were designed by programmers who have never had an intelligent conversation with another human being. A message such as "A sector of fixed disk C: is corrupted or inaccessible. Abort, Retry, Ignore?" (see Figure 6.22) has little meaning to the average user. It's kind of like a waitress asking you "We're out of soup or the kitchen is on fire. Abort, Retry, Ignore?" How would you answer? It's important to phrase questions (and choices) in a manner that the user can understand. In the prior example, a better message might be "There is a problem saving your file on drive C. Save file on drive A, Don't save the file?"
When creating dialog boxes for your application, keep the user in mind. Does the message convey useful information to the user? Is it easily understandable? Do the command buttons present clear choices? Are the choices appropriate for the given situation? Keep in mind that it only takes one annoying message box to give a user a bad impression of your application.
MS are bloody hypocrites!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Anyone who deals with ADO will know what I mean.
Sometimes it seems as if many dialog boxes were designed by programmers who have never had an intelligent conversation with another human being. A message such as "A sector of fixed disk C: is corrupted or inaccessible. Abort, Retry, Ignore?" (see Figure 6.22) has little meaning to the average user. It's kind of like a waitress asking you "We're out of soup or the kitchen is on fire. Abort, Retry, Ignore?" How would you answer? It's important to phrase questions (and choices) in a manner that the user can understand. In the prior example, a better message might be "There is a problem saving your file on drive C. Save file on drive A, Don't save the file?"
When creating dialog boxes for your application, keep the user in mind. Does the message convey useful information to the user? Is it easily understandable? Do the command buttons present clear choices? Are the choices appropriate for the given situation? Keep in mind that it only takes one annoying message box to give a user a bad impression of your application.
MS are bloody hypocrites!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Anyone who deals with ADO will know what I mean.