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Yes/No Dialogs Are Confusing

Copywriting is the most important part of user interface design. Yes/No dialog boxes are a perfect example of poor UI design. The buttons on these should instead be words that verify the action.

John Gruber links to a series of yes/no dialog boxes (one, two, three) written by Microsoft. He states his rule of thumb; “assume the user won’t read anything other than the buttons.”

Yes or No provides no information about the action you’re about to take. It forces you to parse the the words in the question to interpret meaningless buttons.  We face physical dialog boxes every day, could you imagine if those were designed to be Yes/No? Here are a couple tongue-in-cheek examples of what that could look like.

The Elevator

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The Road Signs

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Posted on Jun 18th, 2010 by Damien Huze

Absolutely true… I’ve noticed this is one of the biggest differences between a UI that is intuitive, and one that simply follows old, worn procedures.

Btw, good to finally see a new post after over two years…

Micah Touchet
Aug 26th, 10 at 06:36 pm

Thanks Micah, hopefully I’ll be able to post more than once every other year wink

Damien Huze
Aug 27th, 10 at 01:24 pm

Completely accurate. I’ve noticed this is one of the main differences flanked by a UI that is instinctive, and one that just follows old, damaged events. Thanks!

Robert Clussner
Mar 23rd, 11 at 09:49 am

but the most important question is : how many words and talkative the text inside the button should be ? any sample of good practices for this ?
1 word only, 2 to 3 words ?
obviously it will depends on the number of options ( which are 95% of the time 2 or 3 options only )

Fabrice Meuwissen
Apr 15th, 11 at 11:52 am

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