Notifying the users
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I think I couldn't possibly agree with you more :-) My main reason for starting this topic was to get ideas about new ways to eliminate the need for MessageBoxes, and know about alternatives for it. It would also be interesting to know what people think should happen under certain circumstances. For instance, I'm implementing a Find operation in a text editor. What should happen when the text being searched for cannot be found? A message box? I would prefer not to, since this is something that doesn't require the user to make a decision, I only want to inform him about this without getting in his way. As someone said, the status bar was designed for this but I believe history has shown that messages in the status bar often get overlooked by the user. Not to mention that many programs allow the user to hide the status bar. So I've been experimenting with displaying the "The text was not found" message in a balloon, but I'm uncertain where the balloon should point to and/or where it should be located on the screen (obviously somewhere where the user won't miss it, but not too intrusive either). Should we adopt a MSN-like notification window for these types of messages? Or simply don't display anything whatsoever?
Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beierhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
using the find feature in firefox, which does incrimental searching, if the text is not found the find edit control goes red. no message box, no intrusion into my "work flow", but the status display is where i tend to be looking, at the text i am typing. of course, this does not work so well if your data set makes an incrimental search a poor choice. zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness
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It depends on the goal of the message box. For example, message boxes are useful to train the user not to do stupid things. In some cases, this can be done by validating the control and popping up a balloon box, but in other cases, no. I find balloons annoying because the programmer sometimes implements them so that they require a mouse click rather than whacking the spacebar or enter key to get rid of the message. And an auto-disappearing balloon sucks. I look away and miss the balloon, and wonder what happened? And balloons obscure whatever I'm working on, which I might need to look at to understand what the balloon is talking about. At least a message box, I can move around. Another thing with message boxes is that they're modal, which is great for preventing the user from doing more damage. On other occasions, message boxes are informative, and I really like the "don't display this message again" checkbox on modern UI's. Yet another piece of information for us programmers to track though. Frankly, if it's not in the user's face, they won't pay attention to it, has been my experience. Marc Pensieve
Frankly, if it's not in the user's face, they won't pay attention to it, has been my experience. Exactly, something like "Are you sure you want to cut power to greater metropolitan Los Angeles?" is not a question to relegate to a little balloon ... :omg: People that start writing code immediately are programmers (or hackers), people that ask questions first are Software Engineers - Graham Shanks