I try to not regurgitate information found elsewhere too often, but this is one of the more frequently asked UI questions that I get that actually has a reasonably clean answer.
When do I use ellipsis on buttons and menu items?
A: When the item’s action requires additional information from the user to be completed.
For example, “Save As…” has ellipsis because in order to save, the user must input the file name to save to. “Save” does not have the ellipses because no confirmation is needed.
That one was easy.
How about “Properties”? No ellipses here, because clicking on the item will immediately perform the action of showing properties. Sure it does it in another dialog, but the dialog is actually the result of the item’s action.
Similarly, “Options” does not have ellipses, because it immediately displays the options to the user.
They get harder.
“Delete” or “Delete…”?
Hmm, the delete doesn’t happen right away if we prompt for confirmation. But then again, a confirmation prompt isn’t really asking for more information, it’s just confirming what the user already chose.
Apple’s offical stance on ellipses says that dangerous actions with confirmations should use them. A delete action seems dangerous enough.
Microsoft’s stance on ellipsis in Windows says to not use them for commands that may result in a confirming message box. Seems to apply here, though Microsoft’s wording is vague.
My own stance? I don’t see a confirmation as getting any additional information, it’s just there as a stopgap for accidental clicks on actions that you cannot undo. If the application can undo, then (like Apple suggests) you should probably avoid using pop-up confirmations in the first place. Either way, I would still just call it “Delete”.
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October 2, 2007
Hi Pete.
Think like a user, not like a programmer.
The first thing users do with menus is read them.
In normal usage, the ellipsis signals that the given text is not complete, that more is implied than what is actually written, but
that (hopefully) the reader can infer what’s missing. In this case, the reader is to infer simply that something is missing, but not necessarily what that something is.
So the first thing the ellipsis does is distinguish menu items from those that don’t have them. Menu items that don’t have them are complete by themselves. In what respect? I think in the respect that selecting the item is a complete decision, to be acted upon immediately. I.e., if a menu item doesn’t have an ellipsis, the user should be thinking that it will happen immediately, not after a dialog which, most importantly, would provide an opportunity to cancel the operation, dangerous or not.
A user may not have the same sense of what’s dangerous or not that a programmer has, but that’s not the point anyway. The point is that the decision to act is deferred to the dialog, from the decision to select the menu item. There are more decisions to be made when there is an ellipsis, than just the decision to select the menu item.
Semantically, that’s what the ellipsis means – what is written is incomplete. “Delete” (without a confirmation dialog) and “Delete…” are two different things to a user. The latter is decided (without later opportunity), the latter is not, by selecting the menu item. The former is complete by itself, the latter is only the first of more than one decision.
More work for a developer, then, if there’s an option to turn off the confirmation, since the ellipsis would have to be dynamic. But that’s what would be least confusing to a user, in my view.
Confirmation is further input from the user – it’s the input of a decision. Binary decisions are a very important kind of information, especially in this context. And the ellipsis says the menu item isn’t a single, complete decision, but more than one decision, before the implied operation is finally carried out.
But that’s all just my opinion… 8^)