Sunday, August 10, 2008

No Exit

After displaying and changing a report, I often (but not always) get this dialog box when I close the report:


While the basic intent of this is good - "maybe you'd like to save this," the execution is horrible. Suppose I don't want to save it? In this particular case, this was my regular monthy budget report, which I customized to look at the previous month. I don't want to save it. How do I indicate that in this dialog box?

I can't! All I can do is click OK, get the Memorize dialog box, and click Cancel on it. Why the hell isn't there an option not to save this report? Clicking OK is totally counter-intuitive because it says I want to save it, which I don't.

And while we're at it, how about a Cancel button because I may have closed the report by accident.

This kind of user interface mistake is just unforgivable. It is such a fundamental operation that (in my experience) there's always a build-in method to do this automatically. Most/many/all modern user interface toolkits include a simple method to create a two-button (yes/no) or three-button (yes/no/cancel) dialog box. I would even be surprised if a student in one of my classes did something as lame as to only offer an OK button. That's how weak this bug is.

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