Message boxes are dead | Hacker News Reader

Message boxes are dead

diovo.com

4 pointsedw5197 comments

This guy has a cheapskate attitude. Have him show a way to delete something without warning that I will not regret later...

All he talks about is message boxes that inform you of something. And yes, I want some message boxes to make me think. I do not want to gloss over deleting all the files I just selected in my FTP client, for example.

Every time I have multiple tabs open in both IE and FireFox and I mistakenly hit the button to close the whole browser when I intended just one tab, I am grateful for the confirmation box.

"Have him show a way to delete something without warning that I will not regret later..."

An undo feature might be a better alternative in specific cases, if it's feasible to implement and it's not too dramatic an operation.

For me, with deletion, in all cases it's better. Given that it's sometimes really hard to undelete (or technically impossible, as in the case of an FTP client, for example), I'd rather get the confirmation box before the deletion is done.

Not in all cases. GMail deletes without prompting, but adds a notification about what happened, with an 'Undo' link.

You may be right about cases where it is technically impossible to undelete, but I think in most cases it's preferable to make undeleting easier than to show message boxes.

Not entirely. But most message boxes acted as modal interfaces for non-modal tasks, making them incredible annoying. Good riddance. However, message boxes still have a place when dealing with the rare modal task.

Back in 1995, Alan Cooper mentioned this trend in _About Face_ (his book on UI design, still a good read today).

Can't really agree with the examples as provided.

[Information in c:\danger\wipeout_test.reg has been successfully entered into the registry as a result of your accidentally hitting Enter in explorer.exe]

"It gives the information without annoying me. Very good."

The best time to use a message box is to confirm a action that may have that may have consequences. For example deleting something.

Besides that, a web app should never use them.

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