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Yes/No Dialogs Are Confusing

Copywriting is the most important part of user interface design. Yes/No dialog boxes are a perfect example of poor UI design. The buttons on these should instead be words that verify the action.

John Gruber links to a series of yes/no dialog boxes (one, two, three) written by Microsoft. He states his rule of thumb; “assume the user won’t read anything other than the buttons.”

Yes or No provides no information about the action you’re about to take. It forces you to parse the the words in the question to interpret meaningless buttons.  We face physical dialog boxes every day, could you imagine if those were designed to be Yes/No? Here are a couple tongue-in-cheek examples of what that could look like.

The Elevator

The Road Signs

Posted on Jun 18th, 2010 by Damien Huze

 

This is really great and always gives us a laugh when this comes up.

All photographers should have this printed out and stored away in their camera bags. I know of course, this directive will probably get blatantly ignored, but this is still good to know that we have the right to take pictures.

THE BALL DOESN'T BOUNCE!! Completely amazing, I have never seen this before in my life.

Here’s the issue -

When using Whispersync, staying on the correct page across multiple devices works great–until you decide to re-read your content.

You read thru a book on either your Kindle and your iPhone (or another Kindle).  First time thru, you stay in sync on any device.  Later you decide to either re-read or restart the book. Unfortunately, the ‘Sync to Furthest Page Read’ will always be the furthest page you got to, so your furthest read page remains at either the end of the book or the furthest page you got to and Whispersync will be let you know when you open that book on the device.  You can tell it not to go to the furthest page and continue reading.  Go to the other device and try to sync, and you will be taken to the furthest page read, not the place you were at when you stopped reading on the other device.

This is a problem in a couple of ways.  The simplest is that it makes it hard to re-read or restart any book and use Whispersync to keep your place on more than one device.

Solution – Reset the Furthest Page Read
Use the same device for all of the steps below before opening the book on a different one, the below example is using a single Kindle

   1. Set the Synchronization off  on your Amazon Account (Go to Amazon -> Your Account -> Manage Your Kindle -> Manage Kindle Device Synchronization -> click the “Turn the Synchronization off” button to turn off the synchronization)
   2. Wait about a minute, then exit & re-enter your book
   3. Go to the beginning of your book on the Kindle
   4. Sync to the furthest  page. If it tells you that you’re on the furthest location, you’re good to go.
         1. If not, select Cancel on the sync message, exit and re-enter the book to attempt the reset again.  (I think that the Amazon databases have to get reset-thus the delay; in any case, it always works for me on the 2nd attempt)
   5. Turn on the synchronization setting on your Account – your Furthest Page read will be reset to your new location.
   6. On your other devices–if further along in the book, you will have to go to the beginning of the book, but once done the Furthest Page Read location will sync with your Kindle.

Like I said, its not the most elegant solution, but it works.

I'm glad that I found this solution that works, and simple enough. I had to wait a bit more than a minute (perhaps 5) after i turned off Syncing, but eventually it worked.