If Bob truly has the authority to decide that the entire department can be deleted from the database, and if the employee record really does have a dependency o

If Bob truly has the authority to decide that the entire department can be deleted from the database, and if the employee record really does have a dependency on the department, then the correct response is either: a) Sally's interface has already updated to reflect the fact that the department has been deleted, so she doesn't even have the option to delete anymore b)(where realtime updating of the interface isn't possible) - when Sally tries to modify the deleted record she is presented with a message stating that the action failed due to the department having been deleted by Bob. Sally can now either undo Bob's delete first (or ask Bob to do it), and then undo her own change. User confirmation dialogues are a UI smell, in the same way that a module of code stuffed with if statements and flags is a code smell. It's telling you that your design has a fundamental flaw that needs to be fixed in a non-trivial way. Just t hink about the basic question - should red be "delete" or "no". Either way, the question implicitly recognises that this situation is confusing, and that Sally has a good chance of making a mistake. Knowing that her problem has arisen because she clicked on the wrong button ("when it was clearly coloured red!") is not going to make Sally like your software. Make it so that she can fix her error, not so that she doesn't make the error in the first place.