The Psychology Department of North Carolina State University recently pursued a study about pop-up boxes in order to understand user behavior. The study, which will be published in the Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, was discussed by John Timmer of Ars Technica.

The researchers created a number of fake dialog boxes with various clues indicating to users that they were not real dialog boxes (what they said, mouse behavior, flashing text). One of the boxes read:

Warning! You are about to install some malware. Malware is bad. By reading this warning through to the end and still clicking yes you’re failing the Windows Darwin Test. Don’t be that guy, if you’re reading this message still then wise up and for the love of your family photos on your hard drive click the ‘No’ button.

A panel of 42 college students were told to watch as a series of websites loaded, with questions about the sites to follow. The fake dialog boxes were loaded in a random order, and user behavior was tracked. The study found that students were so anxious to get the dialog boxes out of the way that they ignored them. Here are the results:

• 26 out of 42 students clicked “OK” for the “real” dialog, but 25 out of 42 students clicked “OK” for two of the fakes and 23 on the third
• 9 out of 42 students closed the window (11 closed the dialog box)
• A few users would minimize the dialog window or drag it out of the way
• The response time between dialog boxes, real and fake, did not vary, indicating little time was spent evaluating them

When interviewed after, students indicated that they only cared about “getting rid” of the boxes. Many expressed a “degree of contempt” for the dialog boxes, after long-standing experience with them, which made them not care what the boxes said any longer.

In general, this type of user behavior is quite risky. It opens the opportunity for fake dialog boxes to infect a user’s computer by predicting this type of disinterested user behavior.

There is a lot of talk around this issue, some believing that software designers have some responsibility to make software easier to use, so users won’t be desensitized to clicking through dialog boxes, while others believe that users are at fault / are lazy. I believe that users lack education about potential risks, but also about what to do with pop-up dialogues. Even valid dialog boxes can be hard to decipher, so it’s no surprise that the ubiquity of confusing dialog boxes has created an environment of dismissive user behavior.

Via emergent chaos, ars ; Image: ppdigital @morguefile