When designing for interactions such as sending invites from an event page where the entire process needs to be as quick and unintrusive as possible you generally want to avoid placing any obstacles in the way.  As a product person, you have to deal in features as well as design, in messaging as well as business goals.  These competing interests often require a minimalist’s aesthetic, a bit of discipline and the ability to just say “No”.  Its hard enough to keep advanced functionality out of the way of accomplishing the simplest goals and from continually complicating the user experience as new features get appended on to an existing design.  Striking the right balance of instructional messaging and interface simplicity is just as important.  Sometimes, adding one more sentence on how to do something actually makes it harder to do the thing.  Its always a balance act and often a compromise, usually subjective and rarely an exact science.

One constant sore spot for UI people is dialogs.  Rarely do you want to introduce an obstacle that keeps a user from moving forward.  Its sort of like driving down the road and being prompted over and over again “You are going straight, ok or cancel.”  For one, you may have no idea what will happen if you decide to cancel. Will the car veer off the road into a ditch?  Will it stop dead in its tracks screeching to a halt on the middle of the highway?  If you do hit ok, how often will you have to tell the car to just keep going forward?  “If I want to turn I’ll steer!” You want to shout as you slam your foot on the gas (or worse, the brakes).  In most cases, you don’t want to stop progress just to tell someone that everything is okay.

Operating in this mode we try to avoid dialogs unless they are absolutely essential.  In a recent release, we provided a timed message that notifies you that your invites were sent.  After the notification fades a line of text remained offering confirmation and a link to the invitation.  We spent several iterations tuning the length of time the notification remained and trying to make the confirmation text more visible.  Clutching with white knuckles onto our UX bible we dogmatically tried to avoid introducing a confirmation dialog, but time after time we found that invite organizers were not seeing the message, did not know what next step they must take, and were experiencing basically what amounted to cognitive dissonance.  So, we have reformed.  Our latest patch includes a confirmation dialog.  You will need to hit OK to continue.  There is a close, but there is no cancel.

For those of you who experienced our previous version and have since received the confirmation, I’d love to hear what you think.