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Yes/No/Cancel causes Aspirin sales to soar

Yes/No/Cancel causes Aspirin sales to soar

ankitg12

Comments (38)

  • Grombobulous
    I’ve always loved how TextEdit’s “don’t save” button is actually a red button that says “delete” for unsaved text files.There’s no ambiguity there. The user is very well-informed that they’re about to quit and lose the document they were working on.
  • superxpro12
    We added a clause in our coding standard to make all booleans reference the positive frame of reference only. This happened after I got fed up with dealing with too many if !(!not_has_missing_field) operators. Just.... make everything positive: if (is_field_present)
  • thefourthchime
    One of the most influential books I ever read was About Face by Alan Cooper. What he said about this bad modal dialogue is that you should simply not ask the user, and let them undo later.This was heresy at the time, but turned out to be the native user flow for iOS later on. And now it's common in web apps.https://www.amazon.com/dp/1118766571?lv=shuf&channelId=500&p...
  • SubiculumCode
    1. LibreOffice's recover files dialogue series of steps is frustrating like this.2. Still better than "Yes, Ask me Later" dialogues that are so insulting to users.
  • chuckadams
    My favorite is apps that offer a way to cancel a long-running operation, where clicking "cancel" on the confirm dialog cancels the cancellation.
  • f1shy
    This is more or less the reason why bool is not recommended as a type, instead use a enums which add semantic value
  • tdeck
    A program I occasionally use has a "Don't close" button in that dialog. Of course I'm more used to "Don't save", so I often hit it and then am surprised when the program stays open.
  • tobadzistsini
    Not understanding the aspirin reference.
  • teeray
    (A)bort? (R)etry? (F)ail?
  • sb057
    An active "yes/no/cancel" prompt is a paragon of usability compared to the modern standard of constant yes, except for when it fails with a silent no.
  • flobosg
    (2007)
  • ccvannorman
    I thought this was going to be about a marketing success example for Aspirin! ... Although, I guess in a roundabout way it was.
  • 1970-01-01
    Great title. Great topic. The tiny details are all here, including the 4th option (X), the Abort/Retry/Fail link, and they even have RSS! Subscribed.