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According to Google's material design guidelines, a typical dialog with two actions looks like this:

enter image description here

The title and the text is normal, but what I find interesting is using all-caps letters for the actions.

In the guidelines, it doesn't address this point directly. But, in the case of languages without letter capitalization, it says:

For languages without capitalization (such as Chinese, Japanese or Korean), it is important to maintain consistent placement, spacing, and colors for actions to distinguish them from regular text.

So I assume the main reason is for distinction from regular text.

But as users in the above languages (my own language as well) have no problem recognizing the actions, I was wondering why it should be capitalized in English and similar languages?

And, what other reasons can be behind this guideline?

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  • It wouldnt be a suprise if this guideline came as a result of an a/b testing.
    – Dimitris Chronopoulos
    Feb 18, 2017 at 11:34
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    Adding one point to this, will it be a good practice to give same emphasis(here by using same color) to both the buttons i.e. DISAGREE and AGREE ?
    – Dhiraj Pandagre
    Feb 18, 2017 at 16:46

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You already have the reason: to raise distinction.

  • Make distinction with non-caps text
  • Raise importance visually on the UI
  • Raise importance when the user taps

These are the options:

enter image description here

All of them are understood. However, in the all caps example the order of importance goes

Title->Actions->Description

(or even the actions before the title), while in the others this order is not as evident at first glance.

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