Stop repeating the obvious! I see this twenty times a day, at least.
I fully understand the implications (which aren’t even destructive! The session’s gonna be fine in the background!). You don’t have to remind me every fucking time. By definition, anyone who uses Remote Desktop is not a casual, naïve user. Why do you treat us as such? I’d argue that this dialog is entirely unnecessary, but if you absolutely insist on giving me this piece of data I already know, for fuck’s sake stick in a “don’t show me this again” option.
Patronizing, lazy, unnecessary. EPIC fail.
(By the way, the Mac version of the TS client doesn’t ask.)
(Also by the way, there might be some way to turn this off, but if I have to hunt for it, it’s less than useless to have it at all)
An icon without a label is inexcusable. I can hardly believe this one, it’s such a blatantly awful mistake, and such an easy one to fix. See these icons?
They’re lovely images, actually, but I have no idea what they mean because they lack tooltips on hover. So, cart. Someone’s going to buy it? Someone’s already bought it? What? I never quite figured that one out. Dollar sign is easy enough: Money has been exchanged. The box? Shipped? Received? Nope: it means “Shipping label printed.” Star with a pencil? Write something? Written something? At least the next one, the star with an envelope gives some clue. They’re “Feedback left” and “Feedback received.”
Why did I have to think about that? It’s not the user’s job to figure out your iconography, certainly on a web page, where fixing the problem involves nothing more than adding title="This picture means this thing" to the link tag. Epic fail.
Once you establish a pattern, stick to it. This one was pointed out by @deeann and @geekosaur, and I had forgotten how awful it really is, I’m so used to it now.
First, Apple decided that the “Save to PDF…” button needed more options, and instead of replacing the command button with a proper drop down menu, they added a glyph to a command button:
I really, really hate it when people break standard controls like this, especially OS vendors in global dialogs (and in this case Apple is as much to blame as the usual offender, Microsoft). Predictability is a key tenent of usability: once a user learns how a control behaves, they expect every similar-looking control they encounter to behave that way. This example is particularly bad, as there is a standard control that does exactly what they want.
Full disclosure: I’ve had occasion recently to re-design a drop-down, but it’s for an extraordinarily specific purpose, we’ve styled it very differently from the standard, and use them in enough places (a sort of global-to-System Center) as to establish a pattern. Still, we all agree it’s a gamble and will be tested before it’s released.
Of course, Apple just made a lazy, arbitrary decision and called it a day, something they do too often for my taste.
That’s not the only problem with this dialog. Look at the arrow to the right of the Printer: drop down:
What do you expect it to do? @geekosaur assumed it was a list of recently used printers. I think that’s an entirely fair assumption. It’s not correct though, as the arrow serves as an expander to reveal more printing options and show a mini-preview:
So why the hell is it next to the drop-down? The proximity creates an implicit tie between the two controls, even though they are not functionally related at all. Here Microsoft gets it right, using a pattern specifically for expanders (the chevron) and often giving it a label like “More options…” I like them a lot; here’s a particularly good example, from the Vista global Save dialog:
These are fairly minor, and fairly easy to figure out, but I really expect more from a global, OS dialog, so it graduates to an EPIC FAIL.
Twitter’s got the Fail Whale; There’s the Sad Mac. What clever name should this thing get? Leave your suggestion in the comments, and we’ll have a poll with ‘em in a couple days.
Your faithful correspondent, J.D. Welch, has been a professional print, web & UI designer for ten years. Starting with PageMaker version 3 in the early nineties, he has worked in media ranging from student newspapers to sprawling desktop applications to magazine ads to websites for nonprofits.
