Dialog box
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The design of organisations and products
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Like the “polite notice”, a blight on our modern age. A canker. an almost inevitable transgression of the JC’s seventh law of worker entropy.
Most dialogue boxes are insentient, unwanted interruptions. They require your pointless intervention, before you can carry on the tedious task you were already occupied with. Dialog boxes can and do get buried under other pointless windows, files and dialogues, to the point where that can no longer be found. There they are the cause of many a crashed session.
Ghastly things.
Also, in their way, second-order derivative risk management tools. For what is is a dialog box meant to achieve but allocation of risk, that can only play itself out upon, and not before, catastrophe? Does a dialogue box stop you from downloading a harmful worm from the internet in a suspicious attachment? Does a quarterly compliance attestation prevent the mischief thatcompliance in itself is designed to avoid? It's does not. Quite the contrary: it provides comfort –false comfort – that compliance is in hand, de-escalates whatever risk mitigation and minimisation processes might otherwise be available and instead provides a green signal that the legible world is at peace.
it makes management happy in the meantime, and gives it someone to put finger at later. In this way it resembles much of protections afforded by a legal contract not targeted at practical compliance day today or insuring a robust system, but nearly allocating liability should be unthinkable happened. The risks attested to by the dialogue boxes fall into two categories real ones and bullshit ones. Real ones, we think, will naturally weed themselves out in the same way that, as Rory Sutherland has suggested, if you want to make everything in your kitchen dishwasher proof just put everything in the dishwasher within 3-weeks everything left will be dishwasher proof. Likewise, real risks addressed by salutary dialogue boxes will surely come about from time to time. A few forceps will doubtless suffer p45s on the way out, but, we expect, even cloth headed management will eventually conclude that their risk control framework isn't working and do something to properly address it. Bullshit risks come on the other hand, will remain, kludging up every employees day, burying themselves under open windows, causing system crashes comma and doubtless full time jobs employing and managing them to take account of whatever fantastical risks management is currently preoccupied with.