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Such a pet peeve of mine, weasel-worded buttons. I remember the first time something gave me the option to “Archive” a thing but not “Delete” it...I stopped us

Such a pet peeve of mine, weasel-worded buttons. I remember the first time something gave me the option to “Archive” a thing but not “Delete” it...I stopped using the service after that. Also, usually their least favorite options do not even look like options (random non-button-like text off to the side or whatever). Another atrocity is an alert with a “don’t ask again” check box, especially in something that is unnecessarily-modal (read: developer was lazy). Pro tip: if you think the user won’t want to see your message ever again then you need to redesign your system to keep the message from appearing even the first time.

claudius 8y ago
> Another atrocity is an alert with a “don’t ask again” check box, especially in something that is unnecessarily-modal (read: developer was lazy). Pro tip: if you think the user won’t want to see your message ever again then you need to redesign your system to keep the message from appearing even the first time. That one I think is rather sensible for permission requests from apps. "Do you want to share your location with this app? - Yes/No; [] don't ask again", where the tickbox serves to store the preference forever. An alternative would be "Yes, always"/"Only now"/"Not now but ask again later"/"Never". Not sure which one I’d prefer.
- makecheck 8y ago
  One issue for me is that it’s easy to check a box and then have no idea how to uncheck it later (or forget that you even can). On/off switches for permissions seem sort of reasonable until you imagine dozens of apps and dozens of different kinds of permissions. In iOS for example all you get is pages and pages of toggle switches for all apps to allow/disallow cellular data, which is annoying to manage and has no intelligence in its design. They should have better defaults, such as automatically allowing all apps using less than some reasonable amount of data and automatically inhibiting the data-firehosing apps when you’re roaming. There’s a lot they could do. Asking the user, in general, is a cheap way to just not think through the problem.

claudius 8y ago

> Another atrocity is an alert with a “don’t ask again” check box, especially in something that is unnecessarily-modal (read: developer was lazy). Pro tip: if you think the user won’t want to see your message ever again then you need to redesign your system to keep the message from appearing even the first time. That one I think is rather sensible for permission requests from apps. "Do you want to share your location with this app? - Yes/No; [] don't ask again", where the tickbox serves to store the preference forever. An alternative would be "Yes, always"/"Only now"/"Not now but ask again later"/"Never". Not sure which one I’d prefer.

makecheck 8y ago
One issue for me is that it’s easy to check a box and then have no idea how to uncheck it later (or forget that you even can). On/off switches for permissions seem sort of reasonable until you imagine dozens of apps and dozens of different kinds of permissions. In iOS for example all you get is pages and pages of toggle switches for all apps to allow/disallow cellular data, which is annoying to manage and has no intelligence in its design. They should have better defaults, such as automatically allowing all apps using less than some reasonable amount of data and automatically inhibiting the data-firehosing apps when you’re roaming. There’s a lot they could do. Asking the user, in general, is a cheap way to just not think through the problem.