Applying lessons from journalism to UI design
flow|state has a very good UI design piece up currently. Its simple recommendation: make sure the important bits of the UI are front and center.
Can you see the disaster in progress? Most users can’t either.
This dialog has buried the lede. It focuses the user’s attention on the fact that there is another file with the same name in the destination folder. It fails to point out a much, much more interesting condition: The user is about to overwrite a newer file with an older file.
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The above dialog’s text fails at this, as does its layout and typography. There are numerous pieces of text competing for attention, but among the most prominent are the bolded file names. That’s a bit odd, since the entire premise of the dialog is that these two file names will be the same. The dialog has carefully drawn the user’s attention to information which is guaranteed to be redundant. (If the user is moving multiple files, only some of which have conflicts, the file names are relevant—but that case can and should be handled specially.)
I’ve never thought consciously of following the inverted pyramid while laying out a UI, but it makes a lot of sense. I’m curious to look in on some of the screens I’m working on currently to see how well I stick to this principle.