# UI designers: it's ok to use the words "yes" and "no" **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [December 9, 2022, 10:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ui-designers-its-ok-to-use-the-words-yes-and-no/976275 "2022-12-09T22:16:43Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2022, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ui-designers-its-ok-to-use-the-words-yes-and-no/976275/21 "2022-12-11T21:11:56Z")
Physical buttons with the indicator lights on the button - to do a hard reboot of a computer you need to hold down the button until the light goes off - the light that your finger is covering ---
**Author:** ![minor7flat5](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/minor7flat5/32/258_2.png) [@minor7flat5](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/minor7flat5)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2022, 9:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ui-designers-its-ok-to-use-the-words-yes-and-no/976275/22 "2022-12-11T21:34:19Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > The online textbook for one of my classes, once you’re on the course website, if you click the button for “View Textbook”, it opens up another tab, and the entire content of that tab is a button that says “Open in new tab”, and it’s not until you click THAT that you get the actual textbook. > > The online textbook for my other class, has two different login screens. And if you use the wrong one, it just forwards you to the other one, where you need to enter your username and password again. These two remind me of many in-house apps at work that would send you to a web page that said “click the purple arrow below to continue”, and yes indeed there was always a nice big purple arrow to click. This all was a side effect of some clunky implementation of Single Signon (SSO). I imagine that both apps in your case are doing something similar with SSO, sending the browser to a SSO server that puts some token in a cookie and then sends them elsewhere. If the cookie isn’t there, the middle website would prompt, using LDAP somewhere to do the authentication. In other cases, there might be a different kind of token present that the SSO site could deem “sufficient” and then insert a token for the specific application. When it works as intended, you see a brief redirect followed by the app, with you automatically logged in. If things are done with less finesse, there are often middle pages that crop up. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2022, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ui-designers-its-ok-to-use-the-words-yes-and-no/976275/23 "2022-12-11T21:45:32Z")
It probably is something with a single sign-on system. But the funny thing is, with the first one at least, you can bookmark the online textbook, and once you’re logged in to the main course site, the bookmark for the textbook just works, just like you’d expect it to. ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2022, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ui-designers-its-ok-to-use-the-words-yes-and-no/976275/24 "2022-12-11T21:49:47Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > No one has mentioned\* the current fad for using gray text on a white background, rendering it harder to read, especially if you’re older. Good design specifies a high contrast between letters and background, but style ignores that. > > I blame Apple, which pioneered the type of design. Apple’s philosophy has always seemed to be style over function. One of their bright ideas that really irked me was translucent menus. Yeah, they look cool, but it’s HARD TO READ the text on the menu when the background is showing through. I think a pretty basic principle of UI design is “don’t deliberately make the UI hard to use”. ---
**Author:** ![Robot\_Arm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robot_arm/32/18280_2.png) [@Robot\_Arm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robot_Arm)\ **Post date:** [December 11, 2022, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ui-designers-its-ok-to-use-the-words-yes-and-no/976275/25 "2022-12-11T22:37:11Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > I seem to remember a UI guide that said the opposite, and that it was something Apple did. Granted, it also said not to use “OK” and “Cancel” either. You were to use specific verbs for the situation, for example, a Save button when it’s asking if you want to save. I think the idea was that “yes” and “no” buttons, or “OK” and “cancel”, require the user to read, parse, and understand the sense of the question being asked. Suppose you click on a link in a website and a dialog comes up. > [@](#): > > You’re about to navigate to a different site. Would you like to continue? > > Yes No You have to read it carefully enough to understand what it’s asking; does “yes” mean I want to continue or want to stay? I think that’s why designers shifted to buttons with verbs like “continue” and “stay”; you can just scan the question and get a general sense of what it’s asking, and the buttons are obvious. That said, bad design is still far too common. ---
**Author:** ![gotpasswords](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2022, 12:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ui-designers-its-ok-to-use-the-words-yes-and-no/976275/26 "2022-12-13T00:25:19Z")
My last employer had an HR app (think it was for scheduling time off) that had a perplexing UI - if I wanted to cancel a given PTO event, I would select it, get a box with EDIT or CANCEL options, click on CANCEL, then it would put up a confirmation box that had OK or CANCEL options, but this time, clicking cancel would cancel the cancel. If they built the confirmation dialog to say something like Confirm Cancelation or Exit Without Making Changes, it could have been more obvious. ---
**Author:** ![WildaBeast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wildabeast/32/6_2.png) [@WildaBeast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WildaBeast)\ **Post date:** [December 13, 2022, 12:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ui-designers-its-ok-to-use-the-words-yes-and-no/976275/27 "2022-12-13T00:54:32Z")
When I was in college someone showed me a website called the User Interface Hall of Shame that highlighted many of the things people here are complaining about. It looks like the site still exists, but it also looks like it hasn’t been updated in 22 years. [http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.htm](http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/shame.htm) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ui-designers-its-ok-to-use-the-words-yes-and-no/976275.md?page=1)