September 24, 2008 at 17:01The study found that most users are idiots
Psychology staff at the University of North Carolina conducted an interesting study aimed at studying how people respond to error messages that appear on a PC screen.
Four types of fake dialog boxes with meaningless text and stylized under the standard Windows XP interface were created, but at the same time having a number of serious differences. For example, the status line of the browser was at the bottom of the window, the appearance of the cursor changed, etc. All these signs literally shouted about danger: the “OK” button should not be pressed, but you just need to close the window.
During the experiment, four windows appeared one after another and, to the researchers' surprise, more than half of the users still clicked “OK” on all four windows!
The authors of the study make a disappointing conclusion: Windows error messages appear so often and they are so meaningless that users no longer think about their contents and design, but simply automatically click the “OK” button.
via Ars Technica
Four types of fake dialog boxes with meaningless text and stylized under the standard Windows XP interface were created, but at the same time having a number of serious differences. For example, the status line of the browser was at the bottom of the window, the appearance of the cursor changed, etc. All these signs literally shouted about danger: the “OK” button should not be pressed, but you just need to close the window.
During the experiment, four windows appeared one after another and, to the researchers' surprise, more than half of the users still clicked “OK” on all four windows!
The authors of the study make a disappointing conclusion: Windows error messages appear so often and they are so meaningless that users no longer think about their contents and design, but simply automatically click the “OK” button.
via Ars Technica