April 22nd, 2008

The contradictory dialog: Click Finish to begin

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

I was installing a program and its setup wizard said, and I am not making this up,

Click Finish to begin installation.

But wait, the weirdness doesn’t end there. After you click Finish, the program installation completes, and then you get another page that tells you to click Close. This is misuse of the Finish button. Finish does not mean Almost finished. If the user clicks the Finish button, that’s it. No more wizard pages. It’s finished.

The last two wizard pages should have read

Click Next to begin installation.

You have successfully installed LitWare 2.0. To close this wizard, click Finish.

Category
Old New Thing
Topics
Other

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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