Gatekeeper's Dialog

Re:Gatekeeper's Dialog by jfarmer on Thursday February 16, 2012 @06:06PM (#3601137)

It's accurate but overly technical and unnecessarily frightening. You shouldn't be using terms of art anywhere in your copy unless that's the language your audience speaks, too.

The average user will think they're about to get a virus or do irreversible damage to their computer, both of which are very, very far from the truth.

It's as bad as this type of error dialog:

  +---------------------+
  |                     |
  |                     |
  |  An error occurred  |
  |                     | 
  |             [ OK ]  |
  +---------------------+

What am I supposed to do with that? It provides no information and doesn't give me the opportunity to fix the (very mysterious) problem.

In some ways this is worse because while the dialog is technically accurate, the presentation will alarm anyone who doesn't understand exactly what's happening.

tl;dr: Imagine if your grandma saw this error message. How would she react?

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Re:Gatekeeper's Dialog by msbarnett on Thursday February 16, 2012 @08:06PM (#3601519)

> The average user will think they're about to get a virus or do irreversible damage to their computer, both of which are very, very far from the truth.

Very far from the truth, today, when this is a brand new beta that Devs are just getting their hands on.

But 6 months from now? A year? It's not going to be long before an unsigned binary probably is a trojan or similarly untrustworthy. It's not like Adium isn't going to be signed by the time Mountain Lion ships.

> tl;dr: Imagine if your grandma saw this error message. How would she react?

She'd freak out and throw it in the trash -- which is exactly what I want her to do with unsigned binaries.

There's really no analogy with the "An error occurred" dialog. We want to scare users away from blindly trusting binaries from the internet. "An error occurred" serves no similar purpose in training the user.

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Re:Gatekeeper's Dialog by fpgeek on Thursday February 16, 2012 @08:51PM (#3601661)

I doubt trojans will bother with unsigned binaries. I suspect they'll just do some sort of "social engineering" to get all the developer certificates they want.

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Re:Gatekeeper's Dialog by finnw on Thursday February 16, 2012 @09:45PM (#3601848)

Or maybe we'll see malware distributed in source form. That could be nasty if the development environment gets compromised. Probably more dangerous than a compromised website.

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Re:Gatekeeper's Dialog by jfarmer on Thursday February 16, 2012 @08:51PM (#3601659)

I'm commenting on this dialog, not some future hypothetical dialog that addresses Dustin's concerns.

As it stands it's far too aggressive and unfriendly. Aesthetically, the copy sucks monkey nuts (to put it politely).

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Re:Gatekeeper's Dialog by msbarnett on Thursday February 16, 2012 @08:58PM (#3601691)

I guess I simply disagree. I want the copy to be aggressive and unfriendly, and I'm happy there's no "Continue, and shoot myself in the foot" button for users to fixate on.

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Re:Gatekeeper's Dialog by wtallis on Thursday February 16, 2012 @09:54PM (#3601875)

"You shouldn't be using terms of art anywhere in your copy unless that's the language your audience speaks, too."

In general, that's good advice. However, when it comes to security, and if you're an OS vendor, you don't really want to enable your users' continued ignorance. The concept of digital signatures needs to be a part of normal computer use.

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Re:Gatekeeper's Dialog by jfarmer on Thursday February 16, 2012 @10:57PM (#3602049)

Good luck.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ

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