Umm okay well I just agreed or disagreed to something, and I have no idea what.
Also after watching my kids, there is nothing they wouldn’t agree to onscreen if gets them to next step in whatever they are doing. Would easily sell soul for a donut.
Users complained that that’s not sufficient, “We fat finger it all the time”. Ok, we added a text box to the delete dialogue where you have to type ‘confirm’. “Guess what, we still fat finger it”. Ok, instead of ‘confirm’ you have to type the resource name, id, or type. “Hey, we still fat finger it”. Fine, you can set a resource to un-deletable in its settings, then you have to go to its settings and uncheck that before you can delete it. We get complaints about both how convoluted our delete experience is and about how people still fat finger that.
It’s hard to make everything soft-delete with undo and needing to handle all integrity and correctness between deleted, restored and newly created resources etc. Not to mention regulatory things that require actual delete. But it’s becoming more and more expected or you’re “amateurish”.
> Frankly the empirical evidence is that it is impossible to get users to acknowledge something
Interesting that you changed from “permission” to “acknowledge”. If the people are not “acknowledging” whatever then that sounds like you don’t have their permission.
What kind of forced message are we talking about here?
Phone apps were actually a decent way of asking for permissions - at the start when an app is first installed. That users couldn't say "no" was problematic, but the flow was correct. The newer style of interrupting a user to prompt on the first use is problematic. But the overall idea of setting permissions per app is sound - users needing to make these decisions is unavoidable, especially in the world of proprietary software where the interests of the developers strongly diverge from the interest of the users.
But in my condemnation I really do mean to call out Microsoft specifically. Sure a lot of things have routine dark patterns, but Windows is exceptional in terms of sheer volume and opaqueness. There's a massive difference between some javascript popup that can be ignored or Android asking one pertintent permissions question before accessing contacts/photos/etc, and Windows popping up multiple nondescript "OK" dialogs after a single user intent click.
* Need to notify users about something (not something that requires new consent, just a service announcement like a breaking workflow change). Use emails, uncloseable banners for a month, forced modals, whatever. Users still claim they didn't see it despite proof that they had seen the modal and banner many times
* New feature exists. User explicitly enables it despite a very clear explanation of what it does and simple yes/no buttons. User clicks yes and then complains that it was enabled automatically without their permission. The stuff I work on doesn't deal much in personal data so this wasn't even legal consent, just power features that can cause harm if used flippantly
Not exclusive to development either. I hear the same stories from sysadmins on a weekly basis (of users ignoring any IT communication and clicking buttons randomly without reading, then blaming everyone but themselves). Probably similar stories from any non-tech service job too
It's also why I'm marginally less annoyed now when software prevents me from doing something "for my own good", even when I know what I'm doing. Or proactively prevents "off-label" use cases, because they know that a failure to block a use case will be taken as a commitment to support it