Hot answers tagged confirmation
243
My suggestion: never use the word "Cancel" in the default action.
To cancel a subscription, you can, for example, say "Remove Subscription" or "Unsubscribe."
To cancel a download, you can, for example, say "Stop Downloading".
To cancel a setting, you can, for example, say "Revert Settings".
126
Here's what Facebook does when cancelling a payment subscription (Facebook subscription API).
There's no reliance on Yes/No. There's no misleading use of the word cancel. Clear explanation and buttons that clearly define the impending action.
Then they clearly confirm what just happened.
Skype on the other hand shows what not to do. Much confusion!
59
Age check tests
Leisure Suit Larry was probably the first application to do this, and considering that I played it when I was about 11 years old, I would call it ineffective.
Making some sort of test to make sure that you are old enough, simply encourages younger users as it makes them feel more 'adult'. Additionally, the test was designed for a typical ...
56
Put the pence (the decimals) in a separate field and only accept whole numbers in the two edit fields (pounds and pence). If the user hits the decimal separator key in the pounds field, then move focus to the pence field.
In addition to preventing errors during editing, one should also let the user confirm the values in a different screen/layout. If you ...
32
Name the buttons for what they do. If the default is "cancel", then cancel the cancel should be something simple like "Don't cancel".
I know that it's not ideal to use the word 'cancel' in both of them, but it's the clearest option in this unique situation, and clarity is far more important.
Edit: Some good suggestions from the comments below are to ...
28
download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
27
Rewording
I would try my very, very best to avoid using the term 'cancel' for terminating the subscription. Cancel is generally considered to be a safe action. Here, you are using it in a more destructive sense, thus causing the confusion you noticed.
If you manage to avoid the term 'cancel' for the actual activity, you can resume to use it for the cancel ...
24
These are completely ineffective, just as ineffective as "I'm over 18".
However, they do effectively protect the website from COPPA. If the fact that a certain website has an underage user on it is brought to the attention of the courts, the site can expose its logs, and say that "the user claimed that s/he was over 13, so we didn't know".
It's a legal ...
20
Disclaimer: This is no means by an original idea of mine, but for the love of me, I can't remember where I came across it. I will post an update when I discover its source.
The basic idea for age verification revolves around asking the user an era-related pictorial question. Anybody who's lived through that era should be able to immediately relate to ...
19
The simple solution is Radio buttons with a minimum/maximum payment. See this example from Chase.com's credit card payment form.
The only way I can over pay is if I intentionally choose other amount, I can just click one of the other payment options to either pay the minimum amount I can, my full statement balance, or my whole outstanding balance.
...
17
I would recommend clearly going with an approach which clearly calls out the the potential impact of the action they are going to provide and require them to provide a second level of confirmation. The second level of confirmation can be perhaps done by using a checkbox (like how you have in terms and condition boxes) and then only enabling the delete or ...
15
There's only one way to verify a person's age, and that is to have that person go to your head office in person and present their certified birth certificate plus official photo ID. And even then, they could have hired someone else to do it for them and issued them with false documents (but you might be able in some countries to verify the validity of such ...
14
User confirmation is almost always a bad solution. It breaks the user's flow and there's a real risk of habitually clicking yes on the confirmation. It basically makes 99% of the actions require more attention to catch the 1% that go wrong. And it works poorly. This article explains it better than I can:
http://alistapart.com/article/neveruseawarning
Of ...
13
The idea behind masking is that someone may be watching your screen (from behind you).
(Couldn't find an existing answer with this, even though I am sure I saw it here once, the is the closet I found is Ben Brocka's answer here.)
You could let the users elect to unmask or use the same trick used in mobile phones (temporarily unmasking the last character). ...
13
Many might think that the complementary email might be useless, but this is actually a security message. What if someone left their account logged in, and someone changed the password for them? The ACTUAL owner of the profile should be notified that it was changed.
It has become a standard to make sure that users are aware of what information has been ...
13
This may be a case of the more you make users work, the less they try. I believe when confronted with a task, like trying to understand some content on a page, users do a quick estimate on whether the effort will be worth it or not.
Too often we present users with extensive content and clicking just to tell them something that they already know or don’t ...
12
That is a horrible confirmation message.
The close / clear icon being used in a way that makes very little sense, and is inconsistent with the same symbol on the top right.
Additionally, labelling the message as "Confirmation" is redundant and adds no more useful information to the person reading it. It is also lacking any information letting the person ...
12
If you do a search for age verification best practices on alcohol related sites, you will see that there is a general consensus that these age verification splash pages rarely work but are often required as a part of company policy. To quote this smashing magazine article
During my research, I wondered if there were any laws in Canada or the
United ...
11
Users basically clicked on that alert
box in a completely random way, based
on their prior experience of alert
boxes in other software.
...
On that basis, how far do we go to
avoid alert boxes?
The question almost answers itself: Never use alert boxes.
Modal alert and dialog boxes place a barrier in front of the user. Of course they respond ...
11
CAPTCHA and email verification serve different purposes, so one does not replace the other.
CAPTCHA is a way of trying to make sure that it is a person that is submitting a form and not just a script. There are many alternatives for how you can do this, but that is another question.
Email verification is a way of making sure that the email address that ...
10
I would like to propose a different approach to subscription cancellation.
Instead of confirming that they want to unsubscribe, assume that they were acting intentionally:
If the user doesn't click on any buttons on the dialog, they should be unsubscribed in an hour or five. If they dismiss the dialog with the "goodbye" or "(x)" buttons, they should also ...
7
I think it's a good idea to have only one password field but I think it should be masked by default, with an option to unmask. There are some users that feel this is not as safe, maybe even just because they're not used to see their password in clear text. The solution should address the concern of these users, too.
download bmml source – ...
7
It seems like you have a relatively simple problem in terms of what you want to ask your users, so why not ask it explicitly with four options (where I would emphasise the safest option for each).
So Import and Append and Export and Append would be the most common options I presume. The other options can either be de-emphasised text, another button.
So ...
6
Just don't display the dialog box whilst the user is in the middle of typing - they're busy anyway.
If the dialog box is something to do with what they're typing, then a more discrete notification might be better anyway precisely because they are busy and are trying to get a train of thought out.
It shouldn't be too difficult to detect when the user is ...
6
Yes, it's absolutely fine to have multiple types of notification messages (not confirmation) on a site as long as all of them are grouped logically/consistently and styled respectively (i.e. different placement of notifications from background processes and foreground ones).
Stack Exchange is the perfect example of good implementation: background actions ...
6
Apple apps have a translucent progress display, but it’s an undocumented API. Here is an open source version I came across recently. I haven't tried it yet, but it may meet your needs. The picture shown below is an example given on the github site.
https://github.com/jdg/MBProgressHUD
6
Sadly the only effective way is to make a verification based on an official document, a passport or a visa.
This is in no means waterproof (as the person in question can get that information from someone else, mom or dad comes to mind)
In short there is no real or practical solution for age verification. Everything can be bypassed one way or another.
5
Edited:
The focus shouldn't be on the button by default. That way, Spacebar (or enter) wouldn't dismiss it. This also depends on how important the modal is. Does it need to block the screen? Could it be a notification inline?
Great articles on Modal dialogs and similar problems:
...
5
If you have any idea what the user should be putting into the box, then you could try to detect abnormal inputs. In your case, I suspect £6,300 is significantly more than the usual tax, so having a warning dialog informing them that their tax is 100x what you'd expect (although you'd have to factor in how it might annoy people who actually do pay 100x what ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
