In the debut post of Yes/No/Cancel, an online magazine about user-friendliness published in 2007, Martin Kleppmann explains why the site bears its name — and why buttons labelled Yes, No and Cancel cause headaches. Despite years of usability research, many products remain as frustrating as ever; users should stop buying unfriendly ones, and manufacturers who ignore customer needs will soon see them leave.

Software is among the most complex engineering humanity has devised, yet complexity need not mean difficulty — Google search is built by a big team of world-class engineers over several years, yet offers just a simple search box. Making complicated systems easy is hard partly because engineers cling to habitual ways of working. One programmer habit annoyed Kleppmann so much he named the site after it: the Yes/No/Cancel dialog.

Such dialogs secretly ask two questions at once — save the document? quit the application? — so button meanings shift with the phrasing, and it's never clear which choice destroys your last two hours of work. Apple avoids this by labelling buttons with descriptive verbs, per its Human Interface Guidelines, but the critique applies equally to Microsoft and every other software maker. He also condemns negative questions and sneaky relabelled buttons, closing with notes on Vista's relabelling and the extinct Abort/Retry/Ignore.