posted on May 8, 2004 04:43:01 PM new
One of the classic errors many novice programmers make is use of conflicting actions when prompting a user for action. For example, imagine you designed a word processor. Now, the user types something in a document, then attempts to close the program. Your program puts up a prompt that says: "Changes have been made. Click NO to not save them."
Programming 101 makes it pretty clear it would be much better to ask: "Do you want to save your changes? (Y/N/Cancel)" and make YES the default. This is unambiguous, it's what the vast majority of well-written programs do, and results in happy endings 99.9% of the time.
In Sales Manager Pro, if one attempts to close the program without saving changes to a batch, it displays:
You have unsaved changes.
Do you want to continue with exit?
yes NO (default)
Folks, one does not click YES to ABANDON changes. One does not "continue" with an exit. One (a) saves the changes, or (b) exits and abandons changes, or (c) aborts the action altogether. It is a Yes/No/Cancel situation, not a Yes/No scenario. The likelihood of losing work is very high -- and having just done so, I am steaming.
Forgive me for saying so, but it's incredible this passed QC.
posted on May 8, 2004 08:03:37 PM new
Yes, I agree 100%. What is worst is now when I open a batch and spend much time adding new items to the batch, making a point to click “SAVE AS” each time each item is added, to find that not one of the new items was saved at all!!!!! I find now that I have to rename the batch after making each change to it to be able to save the new changes!!!
