I recently read a Coding Horror blog post about how, as a user of free software, one ought to seriously consider donating money to the software's authors. Jeff gave the application Paint.NET as an example, also mentioning just how awesome of an application it was in general. I needed to create some screenshots for a project I was working on, so I thought I'd give MSPaint a rest and give this new-fangled Paint.NET a try.

Well, Jeff was right. It is indeed "incredibly freaking great". For me, it easily conquers MSPaint-land and is close to invading GIMP-topia. I might elaborate further on its merits in a future post, most of which lie with its very slick UI, but for this post, there's one specific aspect I want to focus on--dialog boxes.

The app's confirmation dialogs are just brilliant. They encompass precisely all the ideals I think every dialog box should live up to. For example, say you decide to paste an image that's 1000x1000 pixels large into a canvas that's only 600x600 pixels small. A dialog box appears looking something like this one.

So why is it so great? Here are three points that came to mind:

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(1) "The image being pasted is larger than the canvas size."
It gives a reason for why it interrupted you.

If I'm not expecting a dialog box to appear, I'm bound to get a little flustered when one does. The first thought that pops into my head is "what happened?" If this question isn't answered immediately, feelings of helplessness build up, making it increasingly likely that as I experience more strange messages, I'll stop using the app altogether. Giving me a reason why makes me feel more in control of what I'm doing.

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(2) "What do you want to do?"
It asks a question of what it expects from you.

One might argue that a question like this one is redundant. "Well of COURSE it's asking the user what it wants him to do", you might say. "It's a blasted dialog box!" But I think even an "obvious" question like this should be stated in order to make it absolutely crystal clear what I have to do.

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(3) "Expand canvas", "Keep canvas size", "Cancel"
It provides a selection of possible answers to the question.

Think of it as a spoken dialog between the user and the computer:

Computer: "Hello Dave. The image being pasted is larger than the canvas size. What do you want to do?"
Dave: "Expand the canvas, please."

This gives the user a very good idea of what actually happens when each button is clicked. Bonus points for accompanying each choice with a short explanation written in complete sentences.

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This kind of structure, I think, makes for an ideal dialog box. In projects I've worked on in the past (before my time with Platinum Solutions of course!), creating dialogs that read like the following was the status-quo:

"Widget save conflict. Click Yes to save as a Foo, click No to convert to a Bar."
|Yes| |No| |Cancel|

What is a "save conflict"? Why did it occur? The "convert to a Bar" choice sounds risky--are there any negative consequences to this? What exactly does the "Cancel" button do? Why doesn't the "Yes" button just say "Save as Foo", and the "No" button just say "Convert to Bar"??

Or take the similarly ambiguous "Abort, Retry, Fail" dialogs we've all seen before. I've always wondered what the real difference was between "Abort" and "Fail". I'm sure I could Google an answer, but that shouldn't even be necessary!

In summary, the dialog box should be given more attention than it commonly gets. The reason it appears should be clear, the question it asks should be direct, and the answers it provides should be self-explanatory.