I just noticed something interesting.

I’ve been reading some research lately about how those typical popup messages don’t really work all that well, because many people click confirm without reading the message. But Firefox does something interesting, at least in one dialog: it has a time-delay of about 5 seconds before the Save button becomes enabled.

In the Firefox extensions dialog, the button includes a timer that counts down from 5 to 1, after which it becomes enabled. When I saw the timer and noticed that it was at 3, I then looked up at the top of the dialog box, probably to figure out a cause of the delay. This reminded me of the application that I was installing, and caused me to at least briefly skim over the text. Not that I could recite the dialog or anything, but without the timeout I probably wouldn’t have even looked up there at all.

I wonder about the usefulness of this technique to other dialogs where you really want to make the user read the message. Making it so that they can’t automatically and thoughtlessly hit “Yes” is probably a good idea. On the other hand, you have to balance this against annoyance, by not making the delay too long.

Still, it seems like a neat idea, and one I haven’t noticed anywhere else.