From the course: Interaction Design for the Web
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Dialog boxes
- How many sites and applications do you know that use dialog boxes as a way to try and lecture you on how you should be using the product? Or as an excuse, because the development team was too lazy to come up with a good way to show a choice in the flow of the interface. Or even take the choice away altogether. The thing is, the dialog box isn't really opening a dialog with a user. Most of the time, it's a monologue where you, the developer, tell users what they did wrong, or force them to make a decision they don't feel qualified to make. I want you to challenge every dialog box's reason for existence. Ask yourself the following questions. Am I asking the user to make decisions that I should make for them? Am I warning them of things they wouldn't need to know about if my interface was better? Are they making this mistake because I didn't design my UI properly? First, put users in control so they don't make errors to start with. If you give them features like multilevel undo, they…