Another Time

Everyone in the #uxdesign business knows that users don't read. But most people don't let this stop them trying to solve UX problems by saying "well, we'll just explain this to them in text". Maybe this is because we don't often get the chance to closely observe people not reading. Truth be told, it's quite difficult to watch people not doing something. Well, this is your lucky day then.

The other day, around midnight, I came back to my PC to find this message on the screen. And then I sat there completely helpless, staring at these three buttons, dispassionately observing my own brain as it was trying to understand the meaning of the 'OK' button. This is not a task that's typically expected to be overly challenging.

The meaning of "Restart now" was immediately clear. So was the meaning of "Another time" - or so my brain led me to believe at the time. And these two options seemed to cover all the possible scenarios - either we restart now, or we restart later. But this makes up for two buttons, both accounted for. What does "OK" mean? The only other option I could think of was to not reset at all - but this did not seem like a reasonable meaning for "OK". If there were a button I'd expect it to say something like "Cancel", for instance. So what would OK do? I felt my brain starting to overheat.

And promptly enough, it gave up. I distinctly heard it say "Oh screw this, I'm going to look for clues. Hey, there's a block of text right over here! Let's go give that a look". Until that point the block of text was completely invisible as far as my brain was concerned. But even having noticed it, and being completely stuck, it still wouldn't read the whole thing. It scanned the paragraph quickly, looking for any clues that might stand out and save it the hassle of reading. And there it was - the number 12:30, something that looks like a time format. And since we're dealing with time, that might be relevant to the problem at hand. This was enough for the brain to concede to read the couple of words immediately preceding the time, which said "install this update". And now we had enough to go on. Apparently the "Another time" button didn't just mean "Not right now", but also "Not 12:30".

So the three buttons actually meant "Restart now", "Restart at 12:30", and "Another time".

Which is much clearer, except that this interpretation is only available to those carefully reading the text from start to end. And we never do that with familiar UI texts, because our time (or, to be more accurate, our attention) is much too limited and valuable to spend it on reading redundant, repetitive #UI texts - you know, like the ones which make up 99% of the popups we encounter. And if this 99% figure seems excessive, keep in mind that I'm not talking about unique popups - the brain is not sophisticated enough to isolate those on its own. I'm talking about each and every instance of any popup we encounter. That's how it works, it forms an automatic response to a class of stimuli formed by extracting a typical representation from each time we encounter these stimuli. I'm really sorry about that last sentence. These are all decisions made independently and automatically by the brain without involving our consciousness at all.

So when we get to a popup, which by definition interrupts our original workflow, we are automatically in a rush to get to the bottom line - "just give me the action buttons and I'll manage. Don't make me read anything". So this whole explanation about 12:30 is not part of the context when we arrive at the three buttons, and we need to decide between the clear "Now", the seemingly innocent "Another time" and the enigmatic "OK".

But not all is as it would appear. "Another time" is actually a tricky one. And once you get what's going on, it's actually pretty cool. Originally I understood it as "A different time". But now I believe that it really meant "Some other time". If you're wondering what's the difference, it's that the former would lead to a time picker where I could reschedule the reset, while the latter just means "Close the popup". This is actually precisely that Cancel button that I was looking for. This is a neat little #microcopy trick, using effects from #socialpsychology to prepare us for the next time this message would appear, to encourage us to "commit" to installing the update when it does, and to prevent us from thinking that this thing will truly go away if we just hit Cancel.

When you're designing dialogs, make sure that your action buttons contain all the information your user needs to make an informed decision. See how "information" and "informed" are related? This is not a coincidence! If you don't give them the information, their decisions won't be informed! And if they need to go look someplace for this information, you haven't really given it to them. You've just laid it somewhere out there and now they need to do the legwork.