# Trivial complaint: Yes or No questions, no Yes or No buttons??



## ChicagoLarry (Jan 26, 2005)

Trivial, in a way... but why does Apple program its software to ask yes or no questions in pop-up dialog boxes, and then not offer a yes or no choice?

For example, in making a Reply in this forum, I hit Send and a popup asked if I wanted to request a receipt for the message. But the only two possible responses were "Okay" or "Cancel," neither one of which answers the question. What's wrong with English everybody can understand, like "Yes" or "No"? 

Apple is so polished and professional in so many ways, but I never understood why they use grammar that doesn't make sense. Gee, how do foreign-speaking people cope?

Yeah, I said it was trivial. Or is it?

LH


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## lurk (Jan 26, 2005)

Actually according to Apple's design guidelines you should never have an Okay Cancel or "yes" and "no" button.  Rather the buttons should have active verb labels so that one should have been something like "Request" and "Decline".  

One thing to remember is that the popup you say was generated by this site and not apple, you would have seen the same thing under windows.


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## symphonix (Jan 26, 2005)

This is something where I definietly have to agree with Apple.

On my Windows machine at work, I frequently have to choose from these Yes/No or OK/Cancel options. The problem is there is no consistency.

In one of my call logging tools, if I try to close a record without saving, it'll ask "Do you want to save before closing? Yes / No"
In Office, if I try to close an unsaved document, it'll prompt "Do you want to save changes to ...? Yes / No / Cancel"
And in another Microsoft application, I get prompted with "Exit without saving changes? Yes / No"
And in yet another big name application, if I try to exit without saving, I get "Save changes? Yes / No / Cancel"

As you can see these are all different ways of asking the same question, and each has its own different behaviour. In some cases, pressing Yes will quit you out of the program without saving, and in others it takes you to the save dialog, and in some it will take you back to the document.

The main problem with the Windows user interface is that there is very little consistency and many of the prompts and options you see are really not informative or clear.  Apple's guideline - that any button you can click on has a very clear meaning, such as "Save ..." or "Quit anyway" - makes a lot of sense.


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## Giaguara (Jan 27, 2005)

The options on that popup came from Jelsoft software. That is, it is from the vBB software. So you could have done the same post in Camino, in Mozilla, in any given browser ... any given OS.

The same as with Yahoo's buttons and "are you sure you want to send this data over internet" blahblahs... those don't qualify either, BUT they are never made for Apple. Just as a generic message, for any operating system and browser.

At least they are not double negative questions. I never know what to answer to those. Like those "Aren't you sure that you want a read receipt?" ...


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## Arden (Jan 27, 2005)

This is actually one of the debating points at XvsXP.com, and I think Dan covers this issue very well.


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## btoth (Jan 27, 2005)

There are plenty of times when Apple breaks their own guidelines though, which is a shame.  Sometimes it catches me off guard when I'm used to being able to just look at the buttons instead of reading the message.


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## scruffy (Jan 27, 2005)

It must be really hard to make custom popup dialogs in Windows or something - lots of software I've seen uses a Yes/No/Cancel dialog, with about three paragraphs describing the what each button will do - completely unrelated to answering yes or no or canceling some action - when a very short bit of text would do if only the buttons were labeled properly...


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## Giaguara (Jan 28, 2005)

Weeelll... it's not hard at all to make the windows custom pop-ups, warnings, errors.. http://atom.smasher.org/error/ it's real easy


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## Arden (Jan 29, 2005)

Giaguara said:
			
		

> Weeelll... it's not hard at all to make the windows custom pop-ups, warnings, errors.. http://atom.smasher.org/error/ it's real easy


 If only it were so easy to actually program it.


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