Sun 14 Mar 2004 07:16:36 PM UTC, original submission:
I considered calling this an "enhancement", but it's a severe enough human interface flaw that I think it should really be called a bug, because contributing to repetitive stress injury is not excusable.
Want to be annoyed? Try starting up straw and signing up for 20 new feeds. Straw gives you three dialogs where one would do, for each feed. The first says
"This druid will walk you through the subscription process.
Press the Forward button if you want to continue"
The second dialog says "Enter the location of the site that you want to subscribe to in the text box below. Press the Forward button if you are done". This is the only useful dialog.
The third dialog (assuming that the user entered a valid RSS feed in the second dialog) says "Press the Apply button if you want to subscribe to the feed below". This is bogus: of course the user wants to subscribe, and it the user changes her mind, unsubscribing later is trivial. You've tripled the number of dialog boxes the user must put up with.
To fix, drop the first and third dialogs. Give the user the second dialog immediately and if the user-supplied feed is valid, subscribe the user without any extra fuss or verbiage.
Basic GUI principle: don't ask the user to confirm an action a second time unless that action potentially causes harm (like data loss).
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