Alert dialog box

Last updated

An alert dialog box is a special dialog box that is displayed in a graphical user interface when something unexpected occurred that requires immediate user action.

Contents

The typical alert dialog provides information in a separate box to the user, after which the user can only respond in one way: by closing it. Closing an alert dialog will provide access to the original window, which is not available while the alert dialog is presented.

Alert dialogs that block the application are regarded as a bad design solution by usability practitioners, since they are prone to produce mode errors. Also when used as error dialogs, they have been shown to be ineffective in their goals to inform users about an error condition or protect from a destructive operation.

Usage

Alerts have several typical uses: [1]

Warning and question alerts typically offer two opposite options to close the dialog ("Allow/Deny", "OK/Cancel", "Yes/No") with the implicit assumption that one will proceed with the paused process that triggered the dialog, and the other one will interrupt the process without action. A good practice in interface design, often included in human interface guidelines, is to label each option with the precise effect that it will have on the process (for example, "Save/Don't save" in a dialog triggered while editing a document with unsaved changes).

The primary reason for using an alert dialogue instead of communicating via the main program window is modality. A typical online form is non-modal. They present to a user many actions that can be performed in any sequence. By contrast an alert dialogue creates a modal state that isolates a particular element of the form and requires a user to address it before proceeding to the next step.

The utility of the alert dialogue is increasing with mobile device penetration, because:

Example

alert() is the name of the method used in JavaScript to spawn an alert dialog. The argument to the method is the text to be displayed in the window.

A dialog created this way will contain a yellow triangle warning symbol (similar to those found on electrical devices), the text of the warning message, and a single button saying "OK" which will close the window.

Such a dialog also assumes control over the user interface, preventing the user from proceeding with any other task in the application until the dialog window is closed.[ citation needed ]

Criticism

Modal alert dialogs are prone to produce mode errors due to their unrequested nature. A study to appear at the Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society showed that when a user dialog appears, the primary goal of users is typically to get rid of them as soon as possible [2] even without any analysis of the causes for the dialog appearance. When asked, users dismissed any dialog box as a distraction from their assigned task.

This is explained by a common complaint about the wording of the message in the alert box, which is often incomprehensible to the user. In applications without proper user-centered design, the developers decide the text of the message, including terms and concepts from the mental model of the programmer, not of the user's view of the world. Since the dialog doesn't work to accomplish the user needs, the common reaction will be to dismiss the alert without further consideration. [3]

Dangerous actions should be undoable wherever possible; a modal dialog that appears unexpectedly or which is dismissed by habituation will not protect from the dangerous action. [4] This problem can be avoided by providing an undo action instead of a warning, [5] or showing the warning in an infobar instead of a dialog.

Another recognized problem is that, as a modal window, the dialog blocks all workflow in the program until it is closed. Users may not recognize that the dialog requires their attention, leading to confusion about the main window being non-responsive, or causing loss of the user's data input. This often happens in data entry forms after an error alert produced by invalid data. The preferred design include changing a visual aspect of the input element to reflect an invalid entry (such as applying a red border), or adding a character such as an asterisk next to the input element that needs to be corrected. [6]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">User interface</span> Means by which a user interacts with and controls a machine

In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine from the human end, while the machine simultaneously feeds back information that aids the operators' decision-making process. Examples of this broad concept of user interfaces include the interactive aspects of computer operating systems, hand tools, heavy machinery operator controls and process controls. The design considerations applicable when creating user interfaces are related to, or involve such disciplines as, ergonomics and psychology.

Object Linking & Embedding (OLE) is a proprietary technology developed by Microsoft that allows embedding and linking to documents and other objects. For developers, it brought OLE Control Extension (OCX), a way to develop and use custom user interface elements. On a technical level, an OLE object is any object that implements the IOleObject interface, possibly along with a wide range of other interfaces, depending on the object's needs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dialog box</span> User interface element

The dialog box is a graphical control element in the form of a small window that communicates information to the user and prompts them for a response.

In user interface design for computer applications, a modal window is a graphical control element subordinate to an application's main window.

A heuristic evaluation is a usability inspection method for computer software that helps to identify usability problems in the user interface design. It specifically involves evaluators examining the interface and judging its compliance with recognized usability principles. These evaluation methods are now widely taught and practiced in the new media sector, where user interfaces are often designed in a short space of time on a budget that may restrict the amount of money available to provide for other types of interface testing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Menu (computing)</span> List of options or commands within a computer program

In user interface design, a menu is a list of options presented to the user.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graphical widget</span> Element of interaction in a graphical user interface

A graphical widget in a graphical user interface is an element of interaction, such as a button or a scroll bar. Controls are software components that a computer user interacts with through direct manipulation to read or edit information about an application. User interface libraries such as Windows Presentation Foundation, Qt, GTK, and Cocoa, contain a collection of controls and the logic to render these.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tooltip</span> Graphical user interface element

The tooltip, also known as infotip or hint, is a common graphical user interface (GUI) element in which, when hovering over a screen element or component, a text box displays information about that element, such as a description of a button's function, what an abbreviation stands for, or the exact absolute time stamp over a relative time. In common practice, the tooltip is displayed continuously as long as the user hovers over the element or the text box provided by the tool. It is sometimes possible for the mouse to hover within the text box provided to activate a nested tooltip, and this can continue to any depth, often with multiple text boxes overlapped.

<i>The Humane Interface</i> 2000 book by Jef Raskin

The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems (ISBN 0-201-37937-6) is a book about user interface design written by Jef Raskin and published in 2000. It covers ergonomics, quantification, evaluation, and navigation.

DOM Events are a signal that something has occurred, or is occurring, and can be triggered by user interactions or by the browser. Client-side scripting languages like JavaScript, JScript, VBScript, and Java can register various event handlers or listeners on the element nodes inside a DOM tree, such as in HTML, XHTML, XUL, and SVG documents.

Archy is a software system that had a user interface that introduced a different approach for interacting with computers with respect to traditional graphical user interfaces. Designed by human-computer interface expert Jef Raskin, it embodies his ideas and established results about human-centered design described in his book The Humane Interface. These ideas include content persistence, modelessness, a nucleus with commands instead of applications, navigation using incremental text search, and a zooming user interface (ZUI). The system was being implemented at the Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces under Raskin's leadership. Since his death in February 2005 the project was continued by his team, which later shifted focus to the Ubiquity extension for the Firefox browser.

Multimodal interaction provides the user with multiple modes of interacting with a system. A multimodal interface provides several distinct tools for input and output of data.

A voice-user interface (VUI) enables spoken human interaction with computers, using speech recognition to understand spoken commands and answer questions, and typically text to speech to play a reply. A voice command device is a device controlled with a voice user interface.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">User interface design</span> Planned operator–machine interaction

User interface (UI) design or user interface engineering is the design of user interfaces for machines and software, such as computers, home appliances, mobile devices, and other electronic devices, with the focus on maximizing usability and the user experience. In computer or software design, user interface (UI) design primarily focuses on information architecture. It is the process of building interfaces that clearly communicate to the user what's important. UI design refers to graphical user interfaces and other forms of interface design. The goal of user interface design is to make the user's interaction as simple and efficient as possible, in terms of accomplishing user goals.

In user interface design, a mode is a distinct setting within a computer program or any physical machine interface, in which the same user input will produce perceived results different from those that it would in other settings. Modal interface components include the Caps lock and Insert keys on the standard computer keyboard, both of which typically put the user's typing into a different mode after being pressed, then return it to the regular mode after being re-pressed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Error message</span> Computer message indicating an error

An error message is the information displayed when an unforeseen problem occurs, usually on a computer or other device. Modern operating systems with graphical user interfaces, often display error messages using dialog boxes. Error messages are used when user intervention is required, to indicate that a desired operation has failed, or to relay important warnings. Error messages are seen widely throughout computing, and are part of every operating system or computer hardware device. The proper design of error messages is an important topic in usability and other fields of human–computer interaction.

In computing, focus stealing is a mode error occurring when a program not in focus places a window in the foreground and redirects all keyboard input to that window. This is considered to be an annoyance or hazard to some users because the program may steal the focus while the user is typing, causing keystrokes to go to the newly focused window, possibly being lost or causing an unintended effect therein. This may be a few keystrokes due to reaction time, or may be more if the user's attention is not on the computer screen, e.g. typing while looking at the keyboard or while reading copy to the side, or if processor lag causes a delay between the focus stealing event and the newly focused window displaying on the screen.

Confirmation dialog is a dialog box that asks user to approve requested operation. Usually this dialog appears before a potentially dangerous operation is performed

MARIA is a universal, declarative, multiple abstraction level, XML-based user interface markup language for modelling interactive applications in ubiquitous environments.

References

  1. ↑ Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines, second edition.
  2. ↑ Fake popup study sadly confirms most users are idiots Ars Technica, 23 September 2008
  3. ↑ Raymond Chen, The Old New Thing: The default answer to every dialog box is "Cancel"
  4. ↑ Raskin, Jef (2000). The Humane Interface. Addison Wesley. ISBN   0-201-37937-6.
  5. ↑ Aza Raskin, A List Apart: Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo
  6. ↑ Cooper, Alan (17 March 2003). About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Wiley. ISBN   0-7645-2641-3.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.