I keep reading UI design articles with developers commenting that modal UIs are always bad from a user-end design point of view. I think it has become a bit too dogmatic. Random comment I pulled from the web: It is generally accepted amongst UI experts that modality is bad. For example, compare the Windows start menu (modal) vs. the Apple dock bar (non-modal). Is the dock bar superior in every way? I personally like the start menu better, and primarily for the fact that its a quick modal operation that can be activated with a hotkey, blocking until I choose something or cancel. Its also more compact than the dock bar, requiring only the space of a single button. Imagine what sort of design wed get if nothing was modal. Wed end up with floating, persistent dialogs all over the place. Imagine the entire expanded start menu staying around on your screen until you explicitly close it instead of blocking: clicking outside of it would do nothing and it would just stay afloat until you hit, say, an X button. Things like popup menus would be disallowed, as those are very modal. UIs would tend to grow into monstrosities presenting every possible operation to the user all at once. These UI experts should think twice about what they say IMO. A balance of modal and non-modal dialogs makes for the nicest UIs as far as Im concerned. The way I see it, modal is useful when it would generally be annoying for a dialog to persist, such as the WIndows start menu or a right-click context menu. Its also useful when that dialog benefits from being driven by a focus-driven input device such as a keyboard or joystick (as opposed to a pointer device like a touchpad, stylus, or mouse). Non-modal is useful for operations that should be not require the user to wait, such as a file download dialog, and ones that are controlled primarily by a pointer device. Modal UIs also save precious UI space. For example, the Windows start menu operates even when hidden by hitting the windows hotkey as a blocking, input-style operation, popping up something in front of the user and preventing him from doing other things until he deals with it. If it was non-modal, it would generally imply that it would stick around, hogging up precious UI space away from the things we do more frequently like, say, using a web browser. The very fact that we can use applications in fullscreen mode without being swamped by floating dialogs and docks and tabs is precisely due to these kinds of modal operations keeping the UI less cluttered. If a UI is starting to get really cluttered and overwhelmingly complicated, then putting some of the less frequently used operations inside modal popups can be a great way to simplify and save space.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 09:49:19 +0000
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