In several games, I've noticed that when you are asked "Do you really want to quit game?", the "Yes" button is to the right, while "No" is to the left. Obviously, we are used to having "Yes" to the left.

Why, then, do the game developers do this? Do they really believe we clicked "Quit game" and then the confirmation button by accident?

No real clue, but one aspect that I would love to see adopted by more software is one found in some industrial and military equipment I've used where there was no quick "Click here once to do whatever this controls" mechanic. Instead there were sliders. In order to select a given option you had to click and drag across the 'button' zone, or make a very deliberate series of key strokes while holding a set key down.

For instance you would have a quit with out saving option. To do so you click and hold on the far right side of the popup window for that 'button' zone, drag to the left. The message changes to "Quitting WITHOUT saving, data will not be saved". Releasing the mouse then cancels the order, but dragging it back to the right confirms it. It doesn't even require dual axis accuracy for it, just capture the curser as you slide it back and forth and lock it on the slider plane.

It takes fractionally longer to do, but gives you multiple point warnings in a far smoother interface. It isn't brining up new popups that you then have to then focus on to bring the mouse directly to and click accurately.

No real clue, but one aspect that I would love to see adopted by more software is one found in some industrial and military equipment I've used where there was no quick "Click here once to do whatever this controls" mechanic. Instead there were sliders. In order to select a given option you had to click and drag across the 'button' zone, or make a very deliberate series of key strokes while holding a set key down.

For instance you would have a quit with out saving option. To do so you click and hold on the far right side of the popup window for that 'button' zone, drag to the left. The message changes to "Quitting WITHOUT saving, data will not be saved". Releasing the mouse then cancels the order, but dragging it back to the right confirms it. It doesn't even require dual axis accuracy for it, just capture the curser as you slide it back and forth and lock it on the slider plane.

It takes fractionally longer to do, but gives you multiple point warnings in a far smoother interface. It isn't brining up new popups that you then have to then focus on to bring the mouse directly to and click accurately.

I don't think that would help much. No matter how complex (short of perhaps a random assortment of different techniques), when you do things repeatedly they become habit. Once that happens you do it without thinking. IHMO undo capability built into the system is a more reliable option.

Undo capability doesn't work all that well when the action you've just confirmed fires 100 rounds of 40mm canon fire down range in real life, or flash starts a blast furnace.

It renders purely accidental clicks nearly impossible as a far more active input is required. There is no way to mistakenly 'click to gain focus' or something and activate the button. You can't run into the problem of having a popup surprise you as you're doing input for something completely unrelated. (More than a few pieces of software suffer from that. Get some error prompt, and it goes away before you even read it because you were in the process of doing something else that happened to share the same controls. FTL: Faster Than Light is a great game example of this. I've let more than a few pirates get away from peanuts and a pile of missiles or drones I don't need because I was trying to select Weapon 1.)

"You just destroyed Syria. Would you like to undo?"

Do they really believe we clicked "Quit game" and then the confirmation button by accident?

You'd be suprised...

It has also become a requirement in some instances when confirming purchases or other transactions to swap yes/no to no/yes. It should stop players from making a mistake and spending in-game or real money that they didn't mean to spend.

These days you have to make your system "idiot proof" "user friendly" so you don't upset players by creating bad exerperiences.

It's all about convention. The developers might be Mac guys.

On the Mac, it's been standard as per the user interface guidelines to put the "affirmative" button to the bottom right of the dialog.

I remember reading that kind of thing in those Ye Olde Heavye Addison Wesley Bookes many years ago, out of my memory it's always been that on Apple, and a quick Google on user interface guidelines brought up a page which, too, had the "OK" button to the right. So, it seems they've not changed their conventions since then.

Another convention I appreciate is that the ESCape key can close out windows, pull back out from drill-down detail, and even arrive at the main menu; but in general, smacking the ESC key half a dozen times doesn't automatically close out the game and leave the player at the windows desktop. Wouldn't matter much if load times were substantially less than, say 1/5 of a second.

In several games, I've noticed that when you are asked "Do you really want to quit game?", the "Yes" button is to the right, while "No" is to the left. Obviously, we are used to having "Yes" to the left.

Why, then, do the game developers do this? Do they really believe we clicked "Quit game" and then the confirmation button by accident?

Do they really believe we clicked "Quit game" and then the confirmation button by accident?

Several years ago we switched to a new program at work (transportation office for a school system) that manages our bus routes. There are two delete buttons on a particular screen, one that deletes a single route, the other that deletes all the routes for a particular school. My boss accidently clicked the one that results in the delete all. He was prompted with a big red popup box that asked if he was sure he wanted to delete them all, which he didn't read and just proceeded to click ok. As soon as he hit the yes button, he knew what he had done, but he had just completely glazed over the message and instinctively hit the ok/yes button.

The point is people tend to not read and instinctively click buttons based on what they think it says.

We also took the somewhat draconian route of removing the ability of all people except one person to delete stuff from that point on.