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In the application I'm working on, an admin user can see a list of tasks which have been scheduled to happen at certain times. The admin can choose to cancel these tasks. How does one phrase the confirmation dialog in such cases?

The company style guide states that buttons should be verbs describing what happens when you click on them, to aid in user comprehension. Dialogs, wizards etc. all say Delete/Cancel, Save/Cancel, Run/Cancel, etc. So far, we've found that this does indeed help make the interface a more intuitive, but in this case, it causes an unforeseen problem.

The problem is that the most obvious option is:

Are you sure you want to cancel this task?

And of course the two options are "Cancel" (meaning yes, cancel the task) and... er... "Cancel" (meaning no, cancel this action).

Any suggestions? I feel I may have to browse a thesaurus...

anaximander
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  • Or you simply rephrase the action buttons: Are you sure you want to cancel this task? [Yes] [No] – AndroidHustle May 30 '13 at 14:11
  • Unfortunately, the company style guide states that buttons should be verbs describing what happens when you click on them (a perfectly reasonable rule). Dialogs, wizards etc. all say Delete/Cancel, Save/Cancel, Run/Cancel, etc. Actually, I should probably have mentioned that. – anaximander May 30 '13 at 14:16
  • @SteveWortham I just found that... it didn't come up in my search or the "these may be similar" suggestions. I guess I was using the wrong terms. – anaximander May 30 '13 at 14:21
  • You could refer to 'canceling' the task as 'deleting' it. – Daniel Cortes May 30 '13 at 14:55
  • It's not deleting, though. They're defined and saved; removing them from the queue doesn't delete them. There's already an option to delete the task entirely, right next to this cancel option. The cancel option merely removes the task from the queue so that it won't be run, but it'll still be saved and can be added back into the queue later. – anaximander May 30 '13 at 15:00
  • So call it remove from queue, unqueue or something like that. Calling that action cancel task is already unintuitive. – JamesRyan May 30 '13 at 15:19
  • @JamesRyan That's kind of my point... – anaximander May 30 '13 at 15:27
  • @anaximander er no. If the task is called 'unqueue task' then 'cancel unqueue task' becomes intuitive. Your company style guide is fine, naming a task 'cancel' is not. – JamesRyan May 30 '13 at 16:30

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