Make Prompt Buttons Active

One of the things that I’ve picked up in my efforts to become a good designer is the recognition that more often than not, it’s really the little things—all the little things—that can really make or break a good experience.

Sometimes, in fact, the little things bug you so much that when they get fixed, you notice, and you’re really thankful, and you just can’t hardly believe that such a little thing seems to matter so much.

I had one of these experiences just now.  I recently switched back to IE (after going with Chrome and then Safari 4 beta for a while).  I figured I’d give v8 a try to see what I think.  I have noticed it is faster than Safari (of course Safari 4 is still beta), but anyways just now I went to do something I’ve done soo many times in all these tabbed browsers, I just wanted to “close what I was looking at.”

Of course, sometimes this means close just this tab, and sometimes all the tabs are related enough to want to close them all.  In IE 7, it would prompt you with a warning that you were about to close all tabs.  This was annoying to me because I never felt comfortable checking the box to always close all tabs because many times I’d just want to close the one, not really catching the fact I had the others open in that window.  Of course, that’s why they made the prompt, but the problem is that I then had to Cancel the prompt and then go target the little bitty X button to close that one tab.

Well, no more!  In IE8, the prompt looks like this:

What’s that you say?  You mean you give me my options right there now?  Who’da thunk it??  This is soooooooo much better than forcing people to “Cancel” and then go target a tiny little button.  I think you can derive a general principle here (and I think it is in the Vista style guide, too). 

Consider if in your prompts you can provide the meaningful actions directly and make the buttons (or link buttons) reflect those actions.

If you can, then do that—don’t make people cancel and then do the action they wanted to do in the first place.

Hope this helps.