Usability problems – “Don’t ask me again”

Note: This is post is one in a series of usability posts. To read my explanation about what usability is click here.

Shown here is one of the dialog boxes that Microsoft Outlook presented me with today. I have setup AutoArchive on my machine so that my mail items older than 3 months get copied into an archive file where I can still get them if I need to but they won’t clog up my inbox.

The problem I have with this is with the checkbox that sits there with the legend “Don’t prompt me about this again”. This bothers me because I don’t think it’s at all clear what that means.

Does it mean :-

• Based on whichever button I click on next (Yes or No), do that every time in future without asking me. 
• Don’t ask me again but just do it anyway regardless of whether I click Yes or No. 
• Don’t ask me again and don’t auto archive anything again. 

I have found myself in exactly the same position with “Read Receipts”. Outlook will pop up a dialog box saying “Don’t ask me again” but it doesn’t say which option will be the default action.

Personally I don’t like read receipts because I might want to read the email late at night and if a read receipt was sent then I know the person knows I saw it and then I feel an obligation to reply.

That said, these days, seeing an email and reading it are two entirely different things so “Read Receipt” should perhaps been “Viewed Receipt” to be more accurate but that’s an entirely different article!

I saw the read receipt dialog box lots and lots of times and always clicked "No" without checking the "Don't ask me again" option because I was concerned that if it didn't ask me again it might automatically send a receipt to anyone that requested it. I had to Google to find out how to set the default and stop the question properly before it went away.

Microsoft has many millions of users of Outlook yet I find myself having to Google to figure out what this little dialog box actually means and what will happen if I tick the option. If I'm having this problem - how many millions of other users are having the same problem? A brief round of questions to a limited panel of users would reveal to Microsoft that this option isn’t clear and is horribly ambiguous and needs changing. 

My point in this surprisingly short rant is that software developers need to be extremely careful about ambiguous terms in their systems. If something can’t be clearly and concisely understood by your users then you might need to rethink it.