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I've been given the following design for an error modal dialog (the rest of the page is grayed out and can't be clicked):
To me, instinctively, it seems redundant having two ways (close button and ok button) to do the same thing (close the dialog).
I don't see the need to have the close button.
Can you provide some more solid reasons to avoid that, or good reasons to have both if I am wrong?
The "OK" button has the wrong word.
It should be a "Continue" button, as this is what's required of the user. The user is being asked to acknowledge they're aware of the nature of the warning, and that they'll be continuing without a current reload/refresh of the data.
It is not OK that the data didn't load, so there's a needless cognitive dissonance created by the use of the word Ok.
The user is being asked to act, it's not a scrolled warning, it's an annoying popup dialog, and they're going to not want to have to think about it or otherwise feel any conflict or uncertainty about the outcome of their action. Therefore the simplest and most mentally accurate model for the button (and dialog between user and app) is to agree to continue.
There is no need for a close button. It does confuse the issue, and is pointless.
// Apparently the system is not able to permit the user to forcefully attempt another refresh, which is the other logical button to put here.
Continue strongly implies to me that I'm going to be navigated away (i.e. continue to another page). Even an OK button still has some implication that I may be navigated away, with the absence of a close button. The presence of the X, even if redundant, gives me assurance that my action is only closing the dialog.
Apr 4, 2016 at 23:51
As a general principle what you want to achieve is clear, easy, self-explaining, etc... ways for your users to interact with your application.
In this type of modal an "OK" or "Close" modal would be pretty equivalent since they don't have to make a decision about something, it's just an short and simple informative message about something that has already happened, at the end they will want just to dismiss.
Is this button enough? Yes, it is.
The X is not mandatory, but the deal here is that it's also a standard that means that also fulfills the goal of "dismiss/get me out of here" and some users will be willing to use it because everyone has already use it at sometime. Considering that it does not produce any significant harm to the design, there's not a strong reason to remove it.
If being redundant gives users more choices, familiarity and flexibility of interaction with minimum or no harm, there´s no a big reason to avoid it.
Additionally (and again, considering the informative purpose of this modal) you could offer [Enter] as a OK shortcut and [Esc] as a X/close one.
Redundancy and duplication is not always a bad thing. The X close icon in the modal is something you see everywhere in software so its meaning is very well known for a very long time (think Microsoft Windows operating system panels and Microsoft apps like MS Office).
A command button with a label is often more explicit than an icon, but the choice of label is critical. OK as a label is generally considered to be ambiguous but in this situation the command button is simply going to close the modal, so will duplicate the functionality of the X close icon.
