Great UI-Design Piece

Bruce Tognazzini's "askTOG" column/blog has been a mainstay of the UI community for some time. Recently, he wrote a piece about an error Scott Adams made editing his blog. In his analysis, he nicely summarizes most of the crucial points about UI design in a very approachable manner.

For no other reason that I found it amusingly direct, here's a snipet:

The only effect of [confirmation] dialogs is to make the developers feel good: “The users may be screwing up, but we warned them, so it is their own fault.”

No, it isn't.

Any time your user loses any work, consider it your fault, and figure out how to prevent it from happening to anyone else.

Cheers,

Geoff S.