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Why Most Software is Rubbish - Part 1: A Yes/No Question Deserves a Yes/No Answer
One of the most annoying aspects of modern applications software is the dialog box that offers “OK” and “Cancel” as potential answers to a question to which the answer is intuitively “Yes” or “No”. I ‘ve just spotted this particular usability sin in the otherwise excellent Opera web browser. If you try to delete an RSS feed it helpfully asks:
“Are you sure you want to delete ‘New Adventures in Software’?”
Accompanied by three possible answers: “OK”, “Cancel” and “Help”. How on Earth is “Cancel” a valid answer to the question? The options may as well be “Cabbage” and “Spaceship” for all their relevance to the question. There’s no good reason for the first two buttons not to be labelled “Yes” and “No”.
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