I have a simple request to make of developers who design dialog boxes for the applications I use: stop forcing me to translate every decision you ask me to make into a choice between Ok and Cancel.

Since this is nominally a Teamcenter blog I’ll pick on their BMIDE first. This is the dialog you get if you attempt to reload a project that has unsaved changes:

Now, I’m reasonably smart; my lips don’t usually move when I read. But I really have to slow down and read messages like this a couple of times to make sure I don’t click the wrong button. What is it with having to translate ever decision into Ok and Cancel? Is their a tax on using more than six letters on a button? How about having us choose from, oh I dunno, buttons that are actually labeled with the actual options? Is it really so hard to do something like this: