Anthony Milner

Over the last few weeks we’ve been designing, implementing and testing a new admin interface for our flagship product Community Manager (for those not familiar with CM it is one of Australia’s leading .net content management systems developed by Elcom Technology and you can find our more about it here). We’ve done some intensive testing and will be finalising the build towards the end of the week however a number of devs have logged an issue which pointed out an irregularity in the design. This email from the Dev manager sums up the issue.

The dev team have been doing a lot of testing of the release during the last few days. Nearly all of them have noticed and logged as a bug the fact that the cancel button is styled differently to the other buttons. Do you think clients will think the same thing?

There is definitely inconsistency here, but it is entirely intentional. I first noticed the use of irregular buttons when using products developed by 37 signals and later became aware of a technique as described by Robert Hoekman, jr in his book designing the obvious, as “leveraging irregularity to create meaning and importance”. The proximity of the cancel and publish button could lead to a user mistakenly click cancel when they mean to save a draft so differentiating it slightly acts as a subtle warning. This also applies to scenarios which have Add/Edit/Delete options.

So basically the rule we’ve applied is when creating content give them a nicely styled button, but if deleting content or cancelling give them a slightly differentiated button which says “are you sure you want to do this?”.

The other option is to physically increase the distance between the buttons but this can create longer round trips and lead to greater confusion as the user attempts to locate buttons.

Of course this does not replace confirmations and warnings, rather it’s a small and thoughtful measure that will hopefully ensure that user have a more pleasurable experience when using the application.