[toadpipe]

Note to readers who might misunderstand: the above posts (parent and parent parent) are trolls. The only thing worse than dialog boxes are attention whore dialog boxes with poor writing. The user does not want to read your stupid dialog box because they should not have to read your stupid dialog box.

If you use an exclamation point, you incite the user to anger; if your message cannot be perfectly understood every time by every person with a quick skim at 30% attention, they will click a random button because they have better shit to do than read the stupid dialog box that you put there because you couldn't be bothered to come up with a sensible design.

The user has a job to do. They want to do that job. Your job is to help them do their job and make the computer disappear, not remind them that they are using yet another piece of shitty code in a shitty program on a shitty and infested piece of junk that they would destroy with a baseball bat, like that guy in Office Space, if they could do it without getting fired.

[cesare]

Maybe I haven't been clear enough, sorry.

The title of this post implies that if you're a programmer automatically you are a poor user interface designer.

To me this is offensive to both programmers and designers.

These are just narrow-minded stereotypes, perpetuated by narrow-minded people.

[toadpipe]

The title and content of the post state that, if the UI is terrible, then it was (probably) created by a programmer. They do not say the converse, nor does the converse automatically follow (the converse being: if the UI was created by a programmer, then it is terrible).

[cesare]

Doesn't make much difference to me.