Comments on: Critical Warning

By: ColeenBurch28

ColeenBurch28 — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 10:03:55 +0000

People deserve wealthy life time and credit loans or just commercial loan can make it better. Just because people's freedom is grounded on money.

By: Greg

Greg — Thu, 14 May 2009 20:30:58 +0000

Alex,
You’re reading too much into this. The UX document serves as a guideline not a rulebook. The choice of icon is as single line of code. Because of the amount of error messages (Over 10K) it’s usually up to the developer to decide and most developers don’t check the guidelines.

In general it doesn’t matter that much if the icon is blue/yellow/red. The icon serves as a bullet point for the text of the message.

By: Mr Lizard

Mr Lizard — Wed, 13 May 2009 21:26:14 +0000

Niczar,

That’s a common problem throughout Windows.

OS X for example refrains from using generic labels.

What would be better here is if there was a button labeled ‘Back up’ – seeing as the dialogue box is clearly making a fuss about how important it is to back up, it seems odd that there isn’t a clickable button to do just that.

By: DigDug

DigDug — Tue, 12 May 2009 14:23:45 +0000

This seems kinda two faced to me. Point to a couple blog posts complaining that IE8 is setting itself as the default browser, as if thats a huge problem for people. Then make a rant about how changing the default browser isn’t a huge problem for people.

Where’s the blog post about how Firefox completely ignores Windows UX guidelines for help all over the place? Where’s the one about the retardedness of the Page Info dialog asking the user “Have I visited this site before today?” Instead of just saying, “Times visited: 4″. Complaining about other people like this really does nothing, and the effort would probably be much better spent criticizing yourself.

By: Wladimir Palant

Wladimir Palant — Tue, 12 May 2009 11:58:38 +0000

It is interesting to note that both Firefox and IE will display a “critical warning message” whenever a website chooses to use the alert() function – even though I cannot imagine a case where an informational message wouldn’t be more appropriate. And both will violate the Vista guidelines in case of a confirm() function – it shows up with a question mark even though it is really just a question.

By: niczar

niczar — Tue, 12 May 2009 09:54:06 +0000

Their first example (Format F:) if flawed, in my opinion. It asks a confirmation for formatting, and the buttons are generic Yes/No. It would be much better if they had labels such as Format/Cancel or even better “Erase all data”/Cancel.

By: David Tenser

David Tenser — Tue, 12 May 2009 08:10:06 +0000

Interesting blog post, and example of how Microsoft uses psychological tricks to keep people from switching browsers.

Completely unrelated: I noticed that Firefox’s dialog box is wider because the text doesn’t wrap as tightly. This may actually hurt readability and seems like a simple thing for us to fix.

By: Robin

Robin — Tue, 12 May 2009 07:48:03 +0000

Does the wording in your first figure really say:

Question icon. Do not use this icon for questions.

By: Kim Sullivan

Kim Sullivan — Tue, 12 May 2009 07:22:07 +0000

I don’t really get the point here. In both warning dialog boxes, if the user clicks “yes”, the result is “data or financial loss, loss of system access or integrity, loss of privacy, wasted time, unexpected consequences…” ;-)