Why are modal dialog boxes evil? [closed]

Question

Re the recent question at when are modal dialogs truly necessary?. WHY are modal dialog boxes evil? Is it because people don't read them anyway? Because they are often implemented so poorly? Something else?

Answer 1

People don't read them, and that's a good thing. You want people to form habits around your UI, but having an important choice in popup is just going to make the user hit OK.

They interrupt the user, they prevent the user from doing other things.

What if you wanted to copy and paste something off the main window? What if you wanted to copy the message in the modal dialog? What if you don't care.

Just compare IE's Find dialog vs Firefox

Compare IE's "Do you want us to remember this password for you?" to Firefox

Answer 2

They are evil because they violate the basic principle that the user is supposed to be able to direct the software's action. Modal dialogs (the evil form of dialog boxes in general) constrain the user to only one action.

Some answers seem to misapprehend that it's any popup that asks for e.g. user confirmation. This could be accomplished without tieing up the entire app or computer; it's this behavior that people object to.

In some environments, modal dialogs only constrain the user in the context of a single application (or maybe less). Really bad modal dialogs prevent the user from doing anything else in the entire operating system (say, Windows).

Answer 3

One of the reasons that I don't like them is because they are showing information in serial(one lot of information at a time) and not parallel(all the information you need to see at once), parallel will allow the user to choose what they want to look at where as in serial you are pretty much forcing them to pick an option.

Plus also the fact that they break a users flow of control(eg steals focus from the object you working on) which I really don't like doing. So in effect from this the user will just hit OK so that they can get back to what they where doing and ignore the information in the dialog box.

Mind you you still need them in some cases.

Answer 4

In a consumer style application, they are more or less useless; users don't read them, learn to dismiss them, and when they DO read them, usually end up being confused. I think a Yes/No/Cancel dialog is downright lazy UI design. The "buttons say what they do" dialog is slightly better, because the user doesn't have to read much.

That being said: In data-critical intranet/"enterprise" applications, they are more or less necessary to confirm destructive actions or to sanity check non-standard workflows that may be allowed but not recommended.

So, I don't think they are conceptually "evil", but more often than not, the result of bad UI design.

Answer 5

Noboy reads them, and they interrupt the program flow. Often when used as error notification they are the precurrsor to a program failure. By the time the user realizes what is going on, the message is gone and they are left to recall or invent the message as best they can.

Answer 6

About half of the answers so far are addressing the flaws of confirmation dialogs, not of modal dialogs. While the vast majority of confirmation dialogs are modal, this does not mean that the two terms are synonymous.

A modal dialog is one which puts the program into a specific mode and does not allow you to do anything which doesn't correspond to that mode while it is open. In the most common implementation, this means you can't access any other windows.

This is evil.

Consider an address book application. Suppose you have an existing person in the address book and you wish to add their roommate.

• If the "add person" dialog is non-modal, you can flip back and forth between the old record and the new one copying and pasting your data.
• If the "add person" dialog is modal, you can't do anything with the old record while the add dialog is open. You can select something to copy before selecting "add", but just one thing. Everything else has to be manually retyped.

On rare occasions, you run into something which truly must be done in one piece without allowing the user to diverge from that task until it is complete. Modal dialogs are appropriate for such cases. But these cases are very rare! Which is basically the point of the other thread referenced by this question.