Yes/No/Cancel causes Aspirin sales to soar

Published by Martin Kleppmann on 19 Jul 2007.

Welcome to Yes/No/Cancel, the online usability magazine. This first article describes the origin of the name, and explains why it is bad to use buttons labelled Yes, No and Cancel in computer programs. I also discuss why user-friendliness in general is a very important topic.

This online magazine (or blog if you will) is about user-friendliness, and lack thereof. It criticises bad design and promotes good design. One might think that after usability research has been conducted for many years and many books have been written on the topic, finally people would have learnt to get it right. But no – my impression is that many products are as bad as ever, and the reason why I am writing this is to raise awareness of these problems.

But why should you care? As a user, you should care because you have a choice – you can stop using/buying the product that is not friendly to use. You can switch to a better one, saving you frustration and annoyance. As a manufacturer, you should care for much the same reason – you are in a competitive environment, and if you don’t carefully consider the needs of your customers, you will see them leaving very soon!

Maybe you ask how this website got its name. Yes/No/Cancel, that sounds like computers. Yes, and a lot of the content here (but definitely not all) is going to be about computer software. Today, many pieces of software are amongst the most complex pieces of engineering which the human mind has devised. It is therefore not too surprising that some software packages are extremely difficult to use. But software is also used by many people every day who don’t want to know about this complexity. Is difficulty of use really necessary? There are some examples of extremely complex systems which are absolutely straightforward to interact with (Google search for example – it’s the work of a big team of the world’s best software engineers over several years, and still it’s just a simple search box).

Making complicated systems easy to use is actually quite a difficult problem. Part of the problem is that the engineers designing the system are often used to a certain way of doing things, but this way is not always best adapted to a particular situation or audience. The designers and developers of a system must therefore constantly be questioning their habits, so that they can find better ways of solving problems if better ways exist.

One particular bad habit of programmers annoys me so much that I decided to name this website after it. Johannes suggested the name: Yes/No/Cancel. The choice you are so often presented with in many computer applications, and so often you have to stop and think, because it’s not immediately clear what each of the choices is actually going to do. Which one of the buttons will cause all your work to be lost if you press it? Which one will save it? And what does Cancel mean anyway? Aaargh, it causes headaches.

Let me explain this with a few examples. A situation in which you frequently encounter a Yes/No/Cancel dialog box is when you are trying to close a document without having saved it. Like this:

Nice of it to ask, you say – you had completely forgotten to save. Ok. Now compare it to this one:

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