Share via

Poorly-Named Dialog Buttons

  • Article

David's comment on my last post made me think about one of my pet peeves that seems to be pretty common: Cancel buttons that don't really mean cancel.

For example:  Open a text file in Notepad.  Do a "Replace" (Ctrl+H):

   

After replacing some text, press the "Cancel" button.  What?  It didn't cancel my replacement?  Oh, I guess "Cancel" really meant "Close."

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 26, 2005
    Just because I indirectly caused this blog post, I have to come with an example of my own: The Cancel button in the standard Open/Save dialog. I know of several people that have been baffled by the fact that they were able to rename and delete files through this dialog, only to find that the changes to the filesystem couldn't be undone by clicking Cancel...
  • Anonymous
    August 27, 2005
    That's a tough one! Often there are "sub-actions" that one can take either in a dialog or in further dialogs spawned by the first one, and it's probably rare that cancelling the outermost dialog cancels the entire sequence of events.
  • Anonymous
    September 08, 2005

    In one of Adam Nathan's recent posts he gripes about one of his pet peeves, which is that the cancel...
  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2006
    We are wellocme to it's configuration.