Is there a better label for the "OK" button in message boxes with just one button?

Question

Having read "Should I use Yes/No or Ok/Cancel on my message box?", I do understand that message boxes with two or more buttons should use verbs instead of e.g. Yes and No.

To further improve the user experience of one of our applications, I'm currently trying to get rid of the OK in message boxes that only have informational purpose and have just one button.

E.g. instead of this:

...I think of using something like that:

Although this currently does not make much sense to me, since I cannot imagine a better label for the button than the "OK".

My questions are:

• Is it good practice to get rid of the "OK" label and replace it with something else?
• If yes, which text might be a good alternative to the "OK"?

Answer 1

Unless there is some confusion among your user base as to what you mean by "OK", I wouldn't suggest changing it. "OK" is one of the most universally understood (in English computing) terms, and I have yet to see it be the cause of any confusion.

Even if it weren't so pervasive, I would still argue that it is the best term to use. When you are presented with a single button, what you are doing is informing someone of something, not asking for their agreement. In English, "OK" is the clearest word that I can think of that has the simple sense of acknowledging something without necessarily agreeing with it.

TL;DR: Stick to using "OK"

Answer 2

You don't need a button or a dialogue to educate your users. You can use a notification bar or Alerts which are fairly common to indicate such situations. Have a look at some of those over here.

http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/components.html#alerts

You should use Dialogue only if

• Another process would trigger after you press OK and system should wait and ask when you read ready for that

• When you want users to make a choice between doing something and cancelling it, like Perform Scanning [Ok] [Cancel]

Displaying a success message through "dialogue box" is "very loud" and you may only use it if the operation had several sub-operations to be completed which all went through successfully and now the parent operation is also complete. At the same time, the completion of parent operation deserved to be announced that loudly.