Why the downmod? I'll trust the author's account of his experience using Adobe products, and the kludginess of modal dialog boxes is generally accepted, but in

Why the downmod? I'll trust the author's account of his experience using Adobe products, and the kludginess of modal dialog boxes is generally accepted, but in my opinion, he got everything else wrong. As a user gripefest about Adobe products, I'd accept it, but as a a Hacker News link, I want to see some insightful generalizations. Also, I'll add that the first article he links to (on Aza Raskin's blog) condemns modality without sufficient feedback and explains how hidden state causes users to make dangerous errors. How that applies to modal dialog boxes is not explained. Modal dialog boxes, if anything, rub the user's nose in the application state. If he had taken Aza Raskin's warnings about hidden state to heart, he would have known what's wrong with allowing users to suppress error messages about missing or invalid data. (His suggestions would be acceptable in an IDE, but in a commercial application for non-programmers... he shouldn't be so sure the modal dialog isn't the best solution. Putting error messages in a status bar or other predictable place might be acceptable, but only if it's impossible for the user not to notice that something is wrong. (Programmers, probably because of ego or professional pride, tend to take a lot more responsibility for their usage errors than non-programmers. Not coincidentally, they tend to design UIs that cause non-programmers grief. Annoyed users are better than users going through the stages of grief, because when they get to Anger it's going to be directed at you.) The second post he links to is just a list of ways modal dialog boxes can be abused or done poorly. For example, modal dialogs may contain poorly formatted text, or have redundant buttons, or poorly labeled buttons, or buttons that appear active but really aren't. They may have error messages that can't be copy and pasted. In other words, it's just a checklist of mistakes programmers should avoid when writing dialog boxes. Most apply to GUI widgets of any kind (poorly formatted text? c'mon) and only a few apply specifically to modal dialogs. So where's the beef? I've written and deployed GUI applications to real users, and I was hoping to see something here I could make use of in the future.