OK or Cancel?

Posted on January 23, 2008 by Jim

I decided to cancel the email message I was composing, and my mail program responded with this confirmation dialog box. I actually read it twice and then pressed the Cancel button as an experiment. Pressing Cancel cancels the Cancel operation. OK completes the Cancel operation.

Is it any wonder that people find computers confusing?

Is there anybody who finds OK and Cancel on this dialog less confusing or more informative than Yes and No options?

I’ll ask again: What idiot decided that Yes and No responses to a question should be replaced by OK and Cancel?

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3 Responses to OK or Cancel?

  1. Ricky C. says:
    January 23, 2008 at 10:24 pm

    In their defense, it’s not actually possible to display a “yes/no” prompt with JavaScript. JS only provides three message box functions.
    alert() displays a message and has an “ok” button.
    prompt() displays a prompt and a text box for answering the prompt, and then an ok/cancel button (it returns the inputted string, or null for cancel)
    and confirm(), the box that you have, shows a message and ok/cancel buttons (and returns true/false corresponding to ok/cancel).

    So yes, it’s odd, but I think they worded the question so that it was minimally confusing, and I think I might have overlooked that humorous contradiction that you point out in this post. In this case, I believe the makers of the website are excused because of technical limitations.

  2. Jim says:
    January 24, 2008 at 9:26 am

    Ricky,

    I couldn’t disagree more. If JavaScript can’t display reasonable confirmation dialog boxes, then we shouldn’t be using JavaScript for user interfaces. Blaming the tool for a product’s shortcomings is a cop-out. We wouldn’t let any other industry get away with it, and we shouldn’t let software developers get away with it.

    I also disagree that the message was minimally confusing. I would expect something like this:

    Press OK to discard this message without sending.
    Press Cancel to continue editing.

    There is absolutely no ambiguity there. The user knows exactly what will happen when he presses one of the buttons.

  3. Phil Wheat says:
    January 24, 2008 at 12:58 pm

    I always find it interesting that with most parts of tool kits, developers are very quick to roll their own functionality (thing DAC’s and such) but with something like this, everyone tends to just take the default functionality and let it ride.

    I completely agree both that it’s a bar that should be raised, and that it shouldn’t take a lot of work to make the user’s experience incredibly better.