HCM UI

Today was another of my biweekly battles with the HCM online time-entry system. I've been marveling over one particular warning message since the system debuted, and today I decided to take a snapshot and point it out as something I feel is somewhat representative of the system's design:

Click to see in windowed context

That's a very easy warning to generate within the system, incidentally. Just make a change somewhere and then try to navigate away from the page without pressing the "save" button first. The system pops a little message at you saying that you haven't saved and offering you two choices.

Check out the semantics of the buttons there. Cancel, in this context, means "Yes, follow through with the navigation I indicated." OK, conversely, means "No, cancel my previous action and leave me here." This is logically nonsensical and inconsistent with the standard uses of the OK and Cancel buttons. OK should always mean "Do what the user said originally," and Cancel should always mean "Cancel the user's action."

(Incidentally -- "go back"? Click the dialog to see the full-screen picture. Go back WHERE? We haven't left the time-entry page yet.)

JavaScript's limited dialog boxes don't provide for a standard Save/Don't Save/Cancel dialog, but one could at least stick with the standard definitions of OK and Cancel -- "You have unsaved changes on this page. These changes will be lost if you continue. Do you wish to continue?"

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Trackback URL for this entry is: http://blog.case.edu/maw33/mt-tb.cgi/1911 More Great Moments in User Intefaces
Excerpt: In the same spirit as a previous entry about the online time-entry system here... I'm home for fall break, and...
Weblog: Mark Wilson's Blog
Tracked: October 23, 2005 03:44 PM

Comments

Even better would be to follow the Mac OS mantra of dialog boxes: buttons should always be verbs. "Save" and "Don't save" would eliminate confusion, and let users skip reading the dialog box text to understand what they were doing.

Posted by Colin Slater on July 19, 2005 03:59 PM

Colin -- Hey! Welcome to Case.

Save/Don't Save/Cancel options would be more intuitive (and require fewer clicks for users wanting to save their changes besides), but I'm not sure there's a good way to do it in DHTML. Maybe if all the off-page links ran through a Javascript function that displayed a pop-up window, instead of a dialog, with the appropriate choices?

Posted by Mark on July 19, 2005 04:37 PM

Heh, I guess I was expecting to lurk pseudo-anonymously a bit longer, but I let the secret out already.

The buttons issue is quite a flaw in javascript. Pop-up windows instead of dialog boxes would definitely fit both UI needs and javascript limitations.

Posted by Colin Slater on July 19, 2005 07:12 PM

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