We’ve blogged previously about Dangerous UI Choices, and I think everyone in this shop has been bitten by the issue described in that article.  I thought that I had defeated the usability problems presented in that article, by making sure to always leave that particular prompt enabled.  Teamworks, however, has outwitted me yet again.

Recently, while inspecting a process in production, I clicked Delete instead of Refresh.  No problem, I thought, this is why I don’t turn off that dialog box.  When the box popped up, I automatically pressed Escape to dismiss it.  Clearly I have been suffering from a dramatic misunderstanding of what that key is supposed to do, since Teamworks deleted the process anyway.

I probably don’t have to elaborate much more on the grotesque violation of user interface traditions represented by this behavior.  Escape is accepted on all major operating systems as the "oh-crap-that’s-not-what-I-wanted-to-do" key.  The bizarre thing about it is, in most Windows Forms development platforms, the Escape key is automatically wired to the Cancel action in a dialog.  You don’t even have to do anything special to make it work correctly.