Re: Yes/No/Cancel
Interesting perception. To me, it’s always been abundantly clear that ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ are definitive answers to the question posed, while ‘Cancel’ means ‘I don’t want to have to answer either way right now; take me back to where I was before’.
Of course that isn’t appropriate for all circumstances, and inevitably there are cases where the standard dialog box gets misused with a question like ‘Do you want to do A or B?’ or something entirely unanswerable by the options presented.
The new policy of avoiding ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ in favour of (for instance) ‘Save’ and ‘Don’t save’ to make the outcome clearer to those who don’t read the question (and are thus susceptible to getting caught out by inconsistencies like ‘Are you sure you want to exit without saving?’ vs. ‘Do you want to save before exiting?’) is better, though.
Better still would be to ban modal dialogs outright, and force designers to come up with a UI that doesn’t need them to interrupt you to ask stupid questions in the first place…
Biting the hand that feeds IT
