It's not that Yes/No dialogs "doesn't work" at all, it's just that they don't work as well.
Yes/No options are easy to get confused over as soon as there's a negative in the question. A question like "Do you want to cancel the delete" with "Yes" and "No" options is easy to get wrong - is that"Yes, delete" or "Yes, cancel". You can work it out if you try, but there will be an avoidable percentage of errors using it.
Two buttons with "delete" and "cancel delete" on them is better.
In both cases you are "presenting several actions", they're just better labelled in the second case, so there's no added complexity to the user. To the coder, maybe, but making good UI's is what coders are paid to do.
Write verbs on buttons. It's really as simple as that, but every OS I know has a problem with doing just that. Even OS X is lacking in that respect (they try, but miss too much).
basically anytime actions are presented without context. for many of the choices presented to you there is no way to logically infer what the system will do based on the information they give you. the design choices are implicit and have to be discovered by the user via rote learning. design choices should be explicit. applications should ask you intuitive questions about how it should handle your data. not a series of drop down boxes and yes or no questions. some third party applications are good about this, OSX and Windows suck at it.
Yes/No options are easy to get confused over as soon as there's a negative in the question. A question like "Do you want to cancel the delete" with "Yes" and "No" options is easy to get wrong - is that"Yes, delete" or "Yes, cancel". You can work it out if you try, but there will be an avoidable percentage of errors using it.
Two buttons with "delete" and "cancel delete" on them is better.
In both cases you are "presenting several actions", they're just better labelled in the second case, so there's no added complexity to the user. To the coder, maybe, but making good UI's is what coders are paid to do.