Every software that you know of has prompts, and they’ve been there since the begining of UI interface, some prompts are there for errors, some are information prompts and others are notorious exception/crash prompts which every programmer hopes or rather wishes would never happen to their code J.

What I really want to focus here is on UI prompts which appear when the software disallows the action that you performed for example you try to paste a file which you’ve already removed and explorer will throw up this dialog.

Another example is when you try to rename an entry in RegEdit and it already has a value with the same name under that key it will show you a big bold prompt like this

The same flow has sort of penetrated throughout the software world and has kind of become accepted principal look at xml notepad when you try to put some nasty characters into an xml name it would show you instead a big nasty UI prompt to tell you in big words that you can’t do that.

Now count the steps you enter into edit mode either by clicking twice on an xml name or pressing F2

1.       You type whatever you wanted to type without knowing if it will throw an error

2.       You press enter.

3.       Software throws an error saying you can’t do it.

4.       If you are lucky the focus will be on the OK button and it will require another Enter or space to dismiss the dialog.

5.       If for some reason the focus is not on the default button you are out of luck either navigate using Tab key or take your hand off the keyboard find wherever your dear mouse is hiding and bring it out to do the click to dismiss this dialog.

6.       Then you go back to editing where you were.

Now consider another scenario if you made the mistake of entering something not valid for that edit box and you decide to move away from it, some software will actually block your move to another edit control until you rectified that problem or hit a cancel button (Esc Key) to explicitly say. Please let me leave this edit box I won’t dare to come to edit it again.

Other software will let you go away but still show the prompt saying you made a mistake and when you dismiss the prompt you would have or could move to another control.

SnapConfig Way of handling UI prompts: 

All of these prompts are annoying at best and break a user’s flow of editing and performing of the action that use intends to do, when designing SnapConfig it was my desire to come to a prompt less UI which will flow smoothly with user and won’t hinder a user even when it has to show errors.  

So if you want to rename an xml name in SnapConfig and enter invalid characters and hit Enter SnapConfig will show this

But if you type another character this error tip will go away automatically hence requiring exactly “0” steps to dismiss an error prompt and yet it’s in your face prompt clearly letting user know what is happening. These prompts are shown in all validation when entering any text on the in place edit control. The tip itself is .Net balloon tip just a little bit of extra handling is done to move it out of the way when not needed. 

There are other kinds of prompts for example you drag and drop an xml attribute or registry data node that already exists under the parent. This is an error condition how does SnapConfig get away with this situation?

Simple it has a message pane specifically built for that, so a lot of error messages which are not suitable for tip prompts go in there hence again it requires exactly “0” steps to dismiss or confirm the acknowledgment of the error.

It is these little things that matter to users and I think this is a UI model that is far more user centric than any of the others commonly used in software development of all kind.