Microsoft Edge swapped Cancel and Confirm on privacy dialog | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Edge swapped Cancel and Confirm on privacy dialog

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54 pointsandreynering17 comments

They A/B tested and found that swapping the order got great engagement and click through? Later they’ll swap it again and it’ll have great click through again! A/B is a black box though, can’t tell why it worked.

Yup. Somebody at MSFT trying to min/max their way towards their next promotion.

And nothing hostile here, just AB testing and data. Kinda reminds me social networks algos for some reason.

Soon, privacy popups will have randomized text, placement, icons, and style, changing each time you take the choice they dislike.

This is a pretty bad take.

Not only is the new (apparently, I don’t use Edge) order easier to dismiss with the ‘better’ option, but it also matches Microsoft’s own guidelines which are applied in most places in Windows: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/win-...

From the guidelines: "Question dialogs (using buttons) ask users a single question or to confirm a command, and use simple responses in horizontally arranged command buttons." The key part being use simple responses. They fail on two parts, it could have just said yes/no like 99% of dialog boxes out there. Secondly it changed the order from standard. On the next guideline: "Whenever possible, assign unique access keys to all interactive controls or their labels.". These buttons do not assign access keys. Agaion y/n are the common ones here. They've literally went out of their way to create a more confusing dialog when the ismple confirm dialog would have been perfect.

To me, this UI style of "highlighting" an option signals that "this option does something significant". This is evident in most confirmation dialogs, as it should be.

Most naggy popups seem to drive users into clicking that highlighted option, and I think this has trained me to consider the dull-coloured choices first.

Microsoft's move intends to confuse users, at least by subverting the usual expectations around privacy nagging.

He's complaining that the privacy preserving option is given more prominence. OK...

Yeah no, every app and every website does this stuff differently, there is no consistency anyways. Who on earth reads a dialog and then doesn't read what the buttons say?

And then criticising that they pre-select "no"? Guess they can't win either way...

"Yeah no, every app and every website does this stuff differently". Do you want to bet on that? I will wager that the top 20 open source applications, use standard yes/no dialogs 5x times more often than a customized version.

This is not alone, I remember seeing a lot of these confusing dialogs with confusing descriptions and out of context buttons that makes me feel like I'm a 12 years old with reading disorder.

There has to be and end to this, a new law or otherwise.

To be fair to *shudder* Microsoft, all the nasty cookie dialogs I see on Firefox have the "Fuck it! Take all my privacy!" option on the right.

It will be malicious when they swap it back the other way.

Turning on the annoyances filter for cookies on ublock origins was one of the best quality of life improvements I made recently, I wish it was more widely known.

Oh... that exists?! Thanks!

One more example of Microsoft acting against the best interests of users which they do often (like making browser choice a pain, hiding settings they really don’t want users to find, etc.) How about work more fixing crappy UX or improving security? Asking for a friend.

Actually, highlighting "No, Thanks" is good idea, it what an user should press.

But _No, thanks_ is the positive option among them...

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