A tiny UX tidbit I like, is the "close dialog" buttons in some products, consider the following 2 buttons:
[ Dismiss ]
"Dismiss" is self-deprecating and is an implicit admission that the warning is annoying, which makes the user less engaged.
[ Got it ]
"Got it" or similar phrasing subconsciously encourages the user that they understand the message and can continue. Even if they don't care about the message at all, at least the message doesn't consider itself "Dismissable" and unimportant... it's a subtle UX change, but makes dialogs are bit more tolerable...
“Got it” buttons fill me with rage in a way I can’t really articulate well. It’s probably due to the mental association at this point, but they always come up in ridiculous first-run tutorials that block me from using their product until I read and acknowledge some inane UI feature like “you can drag your finger to swipe!” or something equally obvious.
A “got it!” button (especially with the stupid fucking exclamation point) makes the software feel like the overly enthusiastic waiter from the restaurant in Office Space who is just nauseatingly upbeat. Fuck off and get me my coffee.
I’d love an OS-wide extension that would take replace the text on every “Got It!” button with “Fuck Off”. I know it would accomplish nothing but it would make me feel so much better using my phone.
> which makes the user less engaged
I don’t want to be “engaged” using your software. I want to accomplish my task and move on with my life. Why must every single aspect of software try to be my buddy nowadays? Why do I need to be “engaged” with it?
The UX that I like best is the one that provides the opt-out at the point where it would be an annoyance. Whenever there's a pop-up, I want an option to say "Don't show me notices of this kind again.". This requires a measure of humility on the part of developers, to acknowledge that learning about the feature they just added may not be the top priority of all users at all times, and an alternative way to learn about the UI.
Start-up tips that have options of "Close this tip", "Never show tips again", and "Next tip" are the best example, because they account both for users who want to learn more about the program and users who already know how to use the program.
> I don’t want to be “engaged” using your software. I want to accomplish my task and move on with my life. Why must every single aspect of software try to be my buddy nowadays? Why do I need to be “engaged” with it?
Engaging software is successful software. Engagement is also just a metric of 'user attention' I guess, which is a bit insidious...
I find the familiarity that modern software assumes unnerving. Everything has a time and place, I wouldn’t want a Got It button while filling out an official form.
> subconsciously encourages the user that they understand the message
One of the problems with these friendlier messaging is, they are friendlier because they are more often only relevant to en_US(2023) linguistic, visual and societal context, and they are often in fact out of context by the time they are dissected into language resources, passed to (human or machine) translators, and executed on user terminals.
[Dismiss] is blunt, cold, harsh, "disrespectful", unnegotiable, but it virtually has no invalid translation candidates. [Got it], [Go ahead], [Fine], those can be anything.
