What Am I Saying Yes To?

by Paul Sherman on January 6, 2010 · 8 comments

in Everything Else

I just took this screenshot this morning. Here’s the situation: I’d just installed new trackpad drivers on one of my Windows laptops. This laptop’s trackpad is a bit hinky, so I knew I wanted to get into the trackpad’s control panel and make some settings changes.

So I clicked the trackpad’s system tray icon to open up the control panel. And was presented with this screen.

Of course my first question was “What does clicking Yes do?” Look at that screen for a moment and put yourself in my shoes. I’ve just fired up software I’ve never seen before, I haven’t selected anything from the icon navigation at left, but it’s offering me an enabled Yes button.

I’ve been conducting usability tests for almost 14 years. During that time I’ve noticed that people are usually afraid to press a button or perform an action when they’re uncertain what will happen. I took to calling this phenomenon being “click shy.”

This is a great example of what causes a user to be click shy. It’s a shame, really. Sloppy programming – that is, failing to set the button’s state to disabled when no relevant selection is made – can have a raft of unintended consequences.

Tagged as: Desktop Apps, Lazy Programming, Windows

  • http://techknack.net/ Andrew

    I don't see the problem. Right there on the first panel, it tells the user *exactly* what each button will do. Yes's description indicates that it's an OK button by a different name, and everyone knows what OK does. If you've changed something, OK saves and closes. If not, OK saves (essentially doing nothing) and closes.

    I see that you've scrolled to the bottom of the text here, so maybe these explanations aren't as forefront as they could/should be. I've also known programs that have tiny scrollbars with a small amount of scrollable content — scrolling from top to bottom reveals only one or two extra lines of content. How much content do you have to scroll through to get to these explanations?

    Maybe they could've started with a disabled button, but I don't really think (in this instance) it's that big a deal. I may be wrong, of course.

  • Josh Carroll

    Simple concept presented in this article – valuable nonetheless. I agree with you from an experiential perspective…big cause for confusion. Thanks for authoring.

  • Josh Carroll

    Simple concept presented in this article – valuable nonetheless. I agree with you from an experiential perspective…big cause for confusion. Thanks for authoring.

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  • http://www.digitalux.nl/ Digitalux

    So what did happen?

    • admin

      It closed the window. Bleah

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