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Pete Brown writes on a number of topics including Silverlight, WPF, .NET, woodworking and working as a consultant in the DC area. On most forums, Pete goes by the name Psychlist1972. Pete has worked at Applied Information Sciences (AIS) since 1996 where he currently performs as a lead architect and project manager.

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What’s Wrong with this Dialog?

There’s a glaring issue with this dialog from the Amazon MP3 Downloader. What is it?

image

For comparison, here’s another dialog in Windows

image

And a third

image

I won’t fault you if you don’t happen to see the problem. In fact, you really need to have the mouse in your hand before your muscle memory points out the issue.

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Posted: Thursday, November 20, 2008 5:19 PM by Pete.Brown

Comments

timheuer said:

position of the OK button?
# November 20, 2008 5:43 PM

Jason Bock said:

The OK/Cancel buttons are reversed?
# November 20, 2008 5:45 PM

Robert said:

cancel should be on the right.
# November 20, 2008 5:48 PM

Ram said:

OK and Cancel buttons are reversed... ;-)
# November 20, 2008 6:02 PM

Martin said:

The Cancel and OK button are aronud the wrong way
# November 20, 2008 6:53 PM

Cory Smith said:

No way to minimize it?
# November 20, 2008 7:02 PM

Peter Bromberg said:

On the Amazon dialog, the positions of the OK and CANCEL buttons are reversed. Also, it appears that the ADVANCED button has focus. Of course, I don't use Amazon's MP3 downloader, preferring to download their purchased MP3's directly.
# November 20, 2008 7:41 PM

Pete.Brown said:

D'oh! Everyone but Cory got it. Sorry Cory :)

We get hung up on conventions such as colors and shapes, but one of the most important conventions is position. People generally look for menus and navigation starting at the top left, and for dialog buttons on the bottom right. The position of those buttons is also important, as you have to do a double-take otherwise.

Pete

# November 20, 2008 7:45 PM

Patrick Burrows said:

It is implying you actually pay for music?
# November 20, 2008 10:44 PM

Pete.Brown said:

@Patrick

Perhaps, but I never ended up buying the music anyway :)

Pete

# November 20, 2008 10:58 PM

Parag Mehta said:

May be the target is Mac users. They spend lavishly! :)
# November 21, 2008 1:06 AM

Dave said:

lol... I had a peer write a tool to support some work I was doing, and she put the OK button to the right of Cancel. I ran it three times and actually told her it wasn't working for me before I realized I was Cancelling out of the thing instead of pressing OK!
# November 21, 2008 10:53 AM

Kevin Le said:

Advanced? Is this only for users who have PhD degrees? How about something like "Additional settings" or simply "More" or something like that? Microsoft, I believe, is guilty of that and if memory serves me right, that nomenclature was started by Microsoft 13, 14 years ago (around Windows 95), and was unfortunately followed by everyone else.
# November 21, 2008 2:43 PM

Piccolo Principe said:

In Gnome (for instance Ubuntu) there's no such a thing like Ok or Cancel... only Close buttons and the configuration is applied instantly. So Gnome users don't have the "muscle memory" needed...
# November 21, 2008 6:07 PM

Johnny Vega said:

It also doesn't appear to have keyboard shortcuts and that you need to use the mouse for everything.
# November 21, 2008 6:24 PM

Vatar said:

It's a Mac thing. /yawn
# November 21, 2008 6:38 PM

Sam said:

Its windows.
# November 22, 2008 12:14 AM

Lars D said:

Ballon tips are only available when the app is minimized to the tray?
# November 22, 2008 4:55 AM

Ivan said:

you wouldn't believe how many ui architects in the real world don't konw this basic rule. at very large and prominent web businesses too.
# November 22, 2008 7:57 AM

Chris said:

Wow! I can't believe you're wasting our time with this ... I thought this was a serious question!
# November 25, 2008 5:22 PM

Pete.Brown said:

@Chris

That *is* serious, and developers make UX mistakes like that all the time. Users often suffer because of us.

Pete

# November 25, 2008 5:53 PM

Richard said:

RealPlayer is a culprit of this as well. I've lost count of the times I've inadvertently clicked "OK" instead of "Cancel" in the "Do you want RealPlayer to steal all of your file associations and completely screw up your computer" dialog box!
# November 27, 2008 3:55 PM

Neil said:

You guys use your mouse too much :) There's another problem with the dialog: the Advanced button appears to have focus by default, which means if you whack Enter on your keyboard to dismiss the dialog you'll actually get the Advanced options up instead. Neil
# November 28, 2008 11:30 AM
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