Making things easy
We came across an interesting dialog box in the course of a recent study worth sharing. A particular flow from quote to purchase was broken in that users could not directly navigate back from the first page of a purchase process to the quote delivery page from which they came. There was no Back, only Close which closed both quote and payment processes completely, losing all data input. Recognising this major problem with navigation on the site that was unable to be repaired because of technical limitations, an interim solution was implemented to warn the user that such an action would cause their quote to be lost, unless a reference number was recorded (pen and paper?). Compounding the problem is this confusing dialog: Continue to Cancel? with options Cancel and OK. How it works is that OK confirms the Cancel, while Cancel cancels the Cancel. Just goes to show that double negatives are not unacceptable. Even stranger is that the button that caused all this was not a Cancel but a Close. Naturally, some users interpreted Cancel as a confirmation of the Cancel, thinking that no-one would want to cancel a Cancel. In reality, most users glanced at this and said OK anyway, not really understanding what the message was on about, and thinking that would be the fastest way to get back from payment to quote. Which of course they didn’t.
Wednesday, March 17th, 2010, 2:52 pm, News
