Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!aplcen!haven!umd5!zben From: zben@umd5.umd.edu (Ben Cranston) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer Subject: Re: User Chosen Alerts (was Re: The Great Alert Contest) Summary: User may not be fully aware of fallout of her choice... Message-ID: <5311@umd5.umd.edu> Date: 13 Sep 89 19:22:04 GMT References: <24871@santra.UUCP> <8461@hoptoad.uucp> <25123@santra.UUCP> <8502@hoptoad.uucp> <1370@speedy.mcnc.org> <8508@hoptoad.uucp> <13586@well.UUCP> Reply-To: zben@umd5.umd.edu (Ben Cranston) Organization: University of Maryland, College Park Lines: 28 In article <13586@well.UUCP> svc@well.UUCP (Leonard Rosenthol) writes: > The concept is something I am calling 'User-Chosen Alerts'. What this means > is that each non-error related alert, such as the Save Changes, or Do you > want to Quit?, etc., have two new buttons. One would read, 'No, and don't > bother me again' and the other 'Yes, and don't bother me again'. What these > would do would be to basically setup a 'preference' of a sort where there > would now be a default setting for the alert, and rather than it coming up > each time it would have, it now has a default choice that is handled > transparently. This way you could setup for a auto-save on close, or a > never save on close, for example. I find this scary on two counts. One, the user may not be fully aware of all the conditions under which a given alert may be given, and thus setup a default she does not want. For example, suppose an application can save two different document types (say a Palette and a Picture). Is it obvious that setting "Save Changes" to "default yes" for Palettes also changes it for Pictures? Two, there is no obviously easy way to rescind the setting. Wouldn't it be more user-friendly to have a "Set Defaults..." menu with nice radio buttons or something? -- Sig DS.L ('ZBen') ; Ben Cranston * Computer Science Center Network Infrastructures Group * University of Maryland at College Park