Coding Horror: UI Follies, Volume II

December 01, 2004

UI Follies, Volume II

There are so many that it's really hard to choose, but I think this may be my favorite nonsensical dialog in Lotus Notes, our enterprise mail system of choice:

Lotus Notes dialog

Good luck. You're gonna need it.

I've given up criticizing Lotus Notes. There's no point. It's like making fun of the mentally retarded*.

This nVidia driver dialog, on the other hand, has a great idea:

nVidia video driver disabled button

I hate the way disabled controls give you no feedback as to why they are disabled. Why can't you click on that greyed out menu? Why is that button greyed out? Who knows. You just can't. You have to suss out the meaning behind the modality by randomly clicking on stuff to see what enables and disables. Ugh.

* In case you were wondering: no, things haven't gotten any better since 1999.

Posted by Jeff Atwood View blog reactions

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Comments

Some UI professionals would argue that it is not a good idea to gray out buttons. If selecting a button is not applicable but the user thinks of selecting it, then allowing them to gives the application an opportunity to explain why it is not appropriate (or would have been grayed out).

Alan Kleymeyer on December 7, 2004 03:10 PM

I agree, but I have a hard time thinking of any reasonable alternative. If an action doesn't make sense, the user needs to know that.. somehow.

Jeff Atwood on December 8, 2004 02:52 AM

If the thingamajig whatever (button, spin control, alien ship power setting slider in the flying saucer that just abducted you) is inappropriate for the modality of the moment, why even display it? I mean really, if the thing can't do anything why even bother the user with the knowledge that it is there?

john_mcpherson1 on September 7, 2006 05:32 AM

John: Speaking for myself, every user I've ever dealt with, including myself, hates the idea of "It just disappeared!"
Alan: Complete non-gray out makes it hard for a user to know if a button's useful or not at any given moment. Would you really be happy with a menu where you couldn't tell instantly if you could paste or not, and actually had to select paste, and DwtfD (Deal with the friendly Dialogue)? It would get old fast.

deworde on November 9, 2007 03:37 AM