UI design - Include a Cancel button or not?

Question

We are designing the UI for a new line of business application. We have no real constraints and are free to design the UI as we see fit. The UI will be done in WPF and targeted for Windows 7, Vista, and XP Pro users.

Many dialog boxes contain OK and Cancel buttons in their lower right corner. Do you feel it is necessary to have this Cancel button or is the red X in the upper right corner sufficient? We are discussing this as we have been noticing more UIs that do not have cancel buttons, only the red X.

Answer 1

Include it. And please also make sure that you make sure that hitting the Escape key does the same thing as the Cancel button.

Also, just because you're designing from scratch, please don't throw out all convention. Take a look at MSFT's UX Guidelines for dialog boxes.

Answer 2

Include it. This is very common in other user interfaces. Give the user the choice of which to use; making it for them might make them annoyed with your interface.

Answer 3

The red button is really for 'Close' rather than 'Cancel'. 'Cancel' canceling a running task. Use a 'Close' button instead. And yes include the 'Close' if there is a reason for people to click on it. The red button is quite difficult to click when you really want to close something quickly.

Answer 4

Users are used to having standard GUI layouts - otherwise they get confused. They also have different ways of using the standard interface. Some people only use the X, some people only use Cancel. People usually ignore the one they're not using, but get confused if their one isn't present. So be safe and keep them both in - it should only be a one-liner function for Cancek anyway.

Answer 5

Include the Cancel button. The red X is VERY hard to tab to. ;)

Answer 6

Present the two designs to the customer - one with the "Cancel" button, the other without. See what their thoughts are.

Better still present them as partially working prototypes and watch them as they use the dialogs. If you ask them to perform a set of tasks and see if they have trouble when asked to cancel an operation.

Having said that, my preference is to include a "Cancel" button for the reasons others have mentioned:

• Accessibility (especially as Esc should be mapped to it).
• Convention (users will be expecting it).