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Via Kareem Mayan’s blog, I came across this story from 1982, when the Apple Lisa team decided upon using “OK” on the confirmation buttons in stead of “Do It”:

When the software required confirmation from the user, it displayed a small window called a “dialog box”, that contained a question, and presented two buttons, for positive or negative confirmation. The buttons were labeled “Do It” and “Cancel”. The designers observed that a few users seemed to stumble at the point that the dialog was displayed, clicking “Cancel” when they should have clicked “Do It”, but it wasn’t clear what they were having trouble with.

Finally, the team noticed one user that was particularly flummoxed by the dialog box, who even seemed to be getting a bit angry. The moderator interrupted the test and asked him what the problem was. He replied, “I’m not a dolt, why is the software calling me a dolt?”

It turns out he wasn’t noticing the space between the ‘o’ and the ‘I’ in ‘Do It’; in the sans-serif system font we were using, a capital ‘I’ looked very much like a lower case ‘l’, so he was reading ‘Do It’ as ‘Dolt’ and was therefore kind of offended.

After a bit of consideration, we switched the positive confirmation button label to ‘OK’ (which was initially avoided, because we thought it was too colloquial), and from that point on people seemed to have fewer problems.

Read all of the story at: Folklore.org: Do It

Technorati Tags: apple lisa, ok, ok-button, do it, dialog, interaction design, user interface

This entry was posted by Jesper Rønn-Jensen on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 09:06 (GMT-1) and is filed under User Interface. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.