Raymond Chen, a well-known developer on the Windows Shell team at Microsoft, mentioned a principle about dialog design in his blog: Do not give the OK button a keyboard accelerator [1].
But it is funny, that even their own products do not follow this principle strictly. A remarkable example is the "Restart Prompt Dialog of Automatic Updates" in WindowsXP. Both buttons "Restart Now" and "Restart Later" have a keyboard accelerator. If this dialog pops up, while I am pressing ALT+N, the current Windows session will be terminated immediately. And there is no Postpone button either. This button appears in Windows Vista, but there is no option "Do not prompt me again, I will restart my computer later.". If I do not intend to restart my computer very soon, I have to press "Postpone" in every 4 hours. It is really annoying! Not only the unfriendly design, but also infinite critical Windows updates. The only one option for me is to turn off "Automatic Updates".
According to the great design principles [2]: I suggest remove those keyboard accelerators and add a 10-second-delay before restarting Windows, so that user can cancel this action. This is called user experience!
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Do not give the OK button a keyboard accelerator
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Microsoft has huge teams focusing on different product lines and it seems impossible for those teams to keep synchronization. Nice ideas from one team may take a rather long time to pass to another team.
I loved Vista when I first saw it, but now I am getting hurt every day by it. So I am not surprised that Vista is considered a big failure.
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