Most Ambiguous Button Award

The Akismet plugin for WordPress wins today’s Most Ambiguous Button award. After subconsciously struggling with the meaning of the “Update options »” button, I realized why I was having such trouble: “update” could be either a noun or a verb, and both words can mean a variety of things in different user interfaces. Moral:  always choose a label for a button that makes its meaning intuitive, or familiar to users, rather than labeling it according to what it does on the back end. “Save changes” would be a good choice here.

This entry was posted in Aside, Compute, Human/Computer Interaction. Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.