"Double" Confirmation Dialog Design Pattern

Sometimes when building a software application you may need to verify a user’s action. This is usually done with a confirmation dialog box or “pop up” that says “Are you sure you wish to…”



There have been many articles written about why these should not be used. Some of the issues are that users are so used to seeing these they don’t actually read any warnings, or that sometimes a user can inadvertently confirm the action simply by typing.

A better idea, one recommended by UI guru Alan Cooper , is to provide an Undo capability. A good example of this is Google’s Gmail. When creating a reply, if you chose to discard the reply the page then shows a message saying “Your message has been discarded” with an option to “Undo discard”.

A time that you might need to use a confirmation is when an Undo option isn’t practical. For example, I a project I once worked on moved data from a temporary database to a different location. (The reason was that the data contained confidential information that needed to be removed before storing into the permanent database.) The user would remove the confidential information, and then choose to “publish” the data, which removed the temporary data.

Originally another developer had employed not one, but two confirmation dialogs because the “users wanted to have the system double check”. Well I firmly believe that two wrongs don’t make a right, so I suggested an alternate design pattern.

My alternative is based on the “terms of service” dialog that many websites use. It is a confirmation dialog that requires you to check a box to confirm your actions, than click OK. You still need to click two items to confirm (the checkbox, then the OK button) but this way you only use one actual dialog. Also, your users are less likely to scream “Yes dammit! I am sure I want to do this already!” to their monitors.