Cancel Buttons

Posted by Ed on November 2nd, 2009 filed in Rants

Want to really piss off users? Place useless cancel buttons all over your UI. I’m talking about Intellij, Perforce, Eclipse and numerous other high profile violators. You wrote the UI. You know for a fact that your app will never cancel operations X,Y,Z (which sometimes take 10-30 minutes to complete.) THEN DON’T PUT A CANCEL BUTTON IN THE UI NEXT TO THAT OPERATION.