User Centered

I am not sure to agree with Raskin entirely.
Undo is great, but until now the confirm dialog has done a good job for me. Especially when during typing my clumsy fingers hit random hotkeys (for those hotkeys that actually have a confirm dialog), or I clicked the wrong menu item, or I clicked on the wrong file to overwrite when saving. Confirm dialogs are not bulletproof, but for me they are useful 95%. With undo, maybe I wouldn't even notice I activated this devastating menu item.
Confirm dialogs are like a tsunami warning - when you use them too often, people will no longer take it serious.

Imagine you are in a grocery. Different alternatives.
1. All the clothes have a label "Warning: It is said that some clothes are made by child labour! Think twice before you buy!"
2. The tshirts have a label "Warning: This tshirt was produced under slavery-like conditions. Maybe you want to buy another brand?".
3. None of them shows a warning, but all of them say: "You may return this article within 2 weeks, if you are not happy with it."

Clearly shows that undo is not everything. It may happen that you don't even notice that something wrong happened. But what if there is a notification to tell you?

4. No warnings. You buy the shirt. Red box on the receipt saying "child labour. Return the tshirt?".
5. No warnings. You buy lots of stuff. Red box on the receipt saying "It is said some clothes are produced using child labour. Return?" Aah yes, a similar red box was on the receipt of the petrol station, and almost any receipt you received.

Same questions as before..
What is the best solution? I think a post-event-notification is more likely to drown in a heap of other notifications, then a confirm dialog. I think it really depends on the situation.

But I don't think we should be too harsh with the confirm dialog.

well true- But I think you're leaving out the "when you mean..." part which is certainly not always the case. So there are good times to use dialogs, but they need to respect our habits.

...those examples in my mind are difficult to follow, but to me, the whole point of Aza's article is that you're not paying any attention to the label at all (in your numbers 1-3) due to habits, I'm not sure what's going on with 4 and 5, but regardless, if you were buying 20 shirts that day, you'd already know what the warning is from the first 19 shirts you picked up, or at least- your motivation is the *shirt* (action/intended function) and not message on the tag or red box (?) It's habitual for us to just gloss over it.

I think weaving the spirit of the article together with the shirt analogy- it would more akin to buying the shirt, taking it home and then realizing once you were already home that you remember a story about the company being involved those labor practices... so you don't want it anymore. A store rep knocks on your door at that point and you hand them the shirt and they hand you your money. (hey- I originally wrote 'the shirt is magically replaced with the money you paid for it')

A humane system would be one that blends the two. How about putting the choices made in dialog boxes onto the undo stack.

Are you sure you want to delete this folder?
Yes
... oh crap ...
Ctrl-Z
(restoring)
Are you sure you want to delete the folder?
No
... phew!


In an ideal world...

Undo for everything. With some indication to help users understand the types of actions they performed. A simple "undo stack" is not good enough.

Some sort of "undo visualizer" is needed, for times when you don't know what you need to undo ("my document is just screwed up, and I don't know what I did" .. "I hit some key and now I can't see my menus").

For times where the user wants to do something that would destroy their data, use encryption techniques to further protect users from themselves. Instead of "deleting" a person's web history, encrypt it.

Grrr...

Fascinating. Truly.

And then applied to me so well as I had already written most of my comment and then clicked on another tab, clicking back to this tab I closed it accidently.............. Ctrl+Alt+Z doesn't save text entered into the form.

I'll write more later when I'm less annoyed.

Yum

Okay, now once again inspired.

It is truly a brilliant post and it is a shift in the way we think about things. How many times have you been working on something (not just computers) and gone, "Oh, crap, I shouldn't have done that?"

They key here is habit. When you have a design that habituates a user you must respect that it is going to happen and design with intent. The intent for speedy and efficient work-flow. That means letting people go back (we do it all the time on the web, "Oh, shoot, didn't mean to click that link, to leave that page, etc... Back Button to the rescue).

Our author isn't advocating the elimination of warning messages but rather the elimination of warning messages that we habituate on.

I work as a software tester at my company and one of the things I must be alert to is the fact that I use the software differently than most users. There is one task that I perform constantly enough for it to become a habit, and I have to click-through a warning to access it. I've become habituated to that box and don't even pause for it any longer.

However, most users don't have to perform that task very often and would find benefit in that warning message because it starts a "dangerous" task that will degrade the whole system.

There are sure to be nuances, imagine working at a bank and every time a customer came up to make a deposit it asked you to confirm the amount. Well, after the 4 month working there, you'd click-through the warning message (if not after the 4th day) because you will have become far more efficient at typing in the amount and built in your own internal confirmation (or at least skip the forced message box).

The reason is simple. It is a primary task in your environment, you are constantly having to take deposits, count them correctly and enter that data into a screen. A warning message slows the work-flow and I'd bet a lot that it provides no greater statistically significant accuracy. In other words, it's better to have the customer take a receipt for confirmation or force a policy where reps repeat back the amount to the customer. (another possibility would be to put a timer on the confirmation message but that's just damn annoying)

Programs that ask every time you want to exit are also seriously annoying. It would be *far* more effective to ask if you've made changes to a file than a "Are you sure you want to exit?" -- I clicked the exit button, almost always the answer is going to be yes.... But provide an "undo" function. Perhaps described better as "return me to what I was doing" function.

I think it is a very good idea. Not the elimination of warning messages but the elevation of warning messages to actually be important enough, whenever they come up, to read and look at.

Yum
By-the-by, as I was thinking about this topic I had to delete a calendar item on my Palm. I clicked past the confirmation message, out of habit, before realizing I deleted the wrong thing... I tried "Undo" -- but alas, no luck, it only works on text.