So I was installing Battlefield 2 the other night, and I ran across a wonderful example of what not to do when designing a user interface.
Never mind the odd cropping (you can thank Snipping Tool for that). I'd rather focus on the many silly things happening here.
For starters, you'll notice that the caption for the window says "Question." That's a rather worthless caption. What are you questioning? Why should I care? Remember, when you're designing a caption, it should be descriptive. I suppose that in this case, it is in a roundabout manner. However, it might have been better to put "Please insert disk" as the caption since that's actually descriptive (though redundant). Remember, your window's caption is more than just useless text that no one reads. It's actually the descriptive way a user finds your window by looking in the taskbar, or the Alt+Tab list. So if your caption isn't descriptive, it's easy for the user to miss it when the window becomes obscured.
The next issue I have with this dialog is the "Retry?" clause. I could understand asking me to retry an operation that I had already tried. However, this dialog simply popped up as part of the installation process. I was already installing things from disk one -- there's nothing there to "retry", only an action for me to take. Retry implies failure, and failure implies I messed something up as a naive user. The clause isn't needed in this case. If you really want to make people feel bad, you could use this wording if the user puts in disk three instead of disk two. ;-) But honestly, this dialog could be equally as informative by just leaving the question off. You're not asking the user for more information, you're asking them to perform an action in order to proceed. Don't be afraid to say that! Dialogs are supposed to be a call to action (assuming you have to use them at all), and this one just comes out sounding rather wishy-washy.
Finally, the buttons... Yes? No? Maybe? Buttons are supposed to be actions, and in this case, the question they're answering is "Retry?" Since that question is silly and should be removed, how to improve the buttons? Simplify! There's really only two actions the user can take here. Either they insert another disk and you want to test it to see if it's Disk 2 or not. Or they want to cancel the installation. That means you only need one button, whose sole purpose is to cancel the installation. The other action is automatic, since it's trivial to determine when new media has been inserted in the drive.
I'm sure it seems petty to whine about something as simple as an "insert next disk" installer dialog. But seriously... EA has a lot of money, and designs some really stellar user experiences. Why not splurge a bit and make that first impression better?
Why? Because EA just laid off 600 people. Everyone who stayed working OT to finish their projects now have to soak up the rest of the work, too. Who has the time to worry about a single dialog window? ;-)
Battlefield 2142 is better!
Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's all DICE in this case. EA is just the publisher. But you'd think since EA publishes damn near everything, they'd have a little bit of quality control. And I know you're on Vista, good luck keeping it working. I tried it here and actually reverted back to XP because I could no longer play online in Vista. According to some forums, disabling UAC is the solution, but this is another thing that EA / DICE really needs to address.
Their entire user experience is pretty terrible. Even patching up to new versions requires going through every patch, you can't go from 1.2 to 1.5 for example. And then adding booster packs requires re-patching, but of course they don't tell you this anywhere - you just get strange error messages about having illegally modified content.
@Philip -- lol, in the grand scheme of things, it's just one dialog. But, it's also one of the first dialogs you see before you even get into the game. So that makes it somewhat more important.
@Thom -- good point, this is all on the installer. But EA chose to go with this installer, and they have build engineers responsible for the installation user experience.
As for Vista, I've had no compatibility issues with any games so far. BF2 runs like a champ, and it even uses my wireless keyboard and mouse much better than it did when they were PS/2 via USB adapter.
Patching is really ugly. I ran the BF2 patch, and it just looked terrible. Honestly, I don't care about the size or the way it happens (WoW patches are frequently 1-2GB, and even then you have to patch multiple times). I care about whether it looks professional and works well. WoW's updater looks really professional, and it works well. BF2's updater looks like it was made for Windows 3.11, and it takes over my entire system without actually pegging either of the CPUs. It was a terrible experience that left me without control over my own computer for about 10 minutes.
I like the ones that say:
;)
@Aaron -- lucky you. I would get PunkBustered after a couple seconds of playing online, even after manually updating the PB files and setting BF2142 and PB to run in administrator mode. After that, I figured I'd rather play battlefield than use Vista.
@Thom -- I don't think it's so much "lucky me" as it is "unlucky you." I've been using Vista since the early betas as my only desktop, and never run into any problems with games on it (and I'm a reasonably avid gamer). Regardless, if a game's doing stupid stuff with UAC and not working on Vista, that's on the game, not on the OS, IMO.
@Aaron -- Oh I'm not blaming Vista at all. It's definitely the game. Just more demonstration on a terrible user experience. When a game won't run on the newest OS, especially for a programmer who is reasonably experienced in this particular OS, there's certainly a problem with their quality control.