Re: Re: Allow ... centralized dialog up front

On Fri, 01 Feb 2013 11:48:33 +0100, Hallvord Reiar Michaelsen Steen  
<hallvord@opera.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 2:18 PM, Florian Bösch <pyalot@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I would propose to centralize this and make it an up-front dialog >  
>> remembered for a site such that:

(Your proposal is broadly in line with the common thinking of browser  
makers today, but...)

>> That kind of bulk approach does not work. Users don't understand
>> what's going on.

That's what research shows. To be fair, we've generally presented the  
options in ways that are over-technical.
"This application will have access to your location" is not as clear as
"This page can tell anyone where you are and where you go while it is open"
...
"If you enter a credit card number in this page, anyone can 'listen in'  
and copy it" compared to "the certificate is issued by an unrecognised  
authority"...
etc
Browsers have got a lot better at this over the last few years, and it is  
probably time to do some more research.

> To what extent are we sure users understand a prompt about for example  
> web storage?

That is the question. As Anne says, the research generally concludes  
"we're pretty sure most of them didn't even read the message".

>> (This has been discussed in the past too, I suggest
>> you read the archives of this list, public-web-notifications maybe,
>> and probably public-device-apis.)
>
> It certainly has been discussed but not really resolved - also, UI  
> paradigms and usability research evolve, so I guess it's natural to  
> revisit this discussion now and then.

Yes.

> It does of course lie somewhat outside of the scope of most W3C work,
> given that it is about a specific aspect of browser UI,

Yep. There was some security work done a few years ago specifically  
looking at the sort of things that users understood, which recommended  
that for security it is helpful to have consistent presentation across  
browser UI.

While it is useful to do the research, and share results, especially where  
we can show that consistency is important, how to implement this is  
basically a user agent implementation question. And it has evolved over  
time.

> which might be one of the reasons why it's so hard to find good  
> solutions.

Maybe, but I think the main reason is that it is a very hard problem. (One  
secondary reason is that browser vendors generally "don't pay enough  
attention" to really thinking hard about user experience and usability as  
an evidence-based and evolving field, where it is almost impossible to do  
"too much work" - but very possible to overrun any budget you can come up  
with).

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathie Nevile - Consultant (web standards) CTO Office, Yandex
       chaals@yandex-team.ru         Find more at http://yandex.com

Received on Friday, 1 February 2013 11:31:37 UTC