About Face 2.0(c) The Essentials of Interaction Design

If a dialog box doesn't have a title bar, it cannot be moved. All dialog boxes should be movable so they don't obscure the contents of the windows they overlap. Therefore, all dialog boxes should have title bars. Is that clear? Even the Windows style guide almost agrees on this point, saying, "In general, an application should use only movable dialog boxes."

There seems to be some belief that system modal messages (which, of course, you will never create) don't need to have title bars because they are often used to report fatal errors. The programmer's reasoning is: "Well, the system is crashed, so why bother to let the users move the dialog around?" Of course, a system crash is precisely the time you might need to get a good look at what was on your screen before you reboot. After all, you will probably lose whatever was there.

There also seems to be widespread confusion about what text string to put in the title bar of a dialog box. Some people think it should be the name of the function, whereas others think it should be the name of the program. The belt-and-suspenders crew tends to use both. The correct answer is very simple: neither of these.

If the dialog box is a function dialog, the title bar should have the function's action—the verb, if you will. For example, if you request Break from the Insert menu, the title bar of the dialog should say Insert Break. What are we doing? We are inserting a break! We are not breaking, so the title bar should not say Break. A word like that could easily scare or confuse someone.

When the function will operate on some selection, the title bar should, when practical, indicate what is selected to the best of its capability. For example, if you select the sentence, "Smilin' Ed is dead," and invoke the Font item from the Format menu, the dialog's title bar should say Format Font for "Smilin' Ed is dead." If you've selected text that's too big to fit on the title bar, it should show the first and last couple of words of the selection separated by ellipses. If nothing is selected, the caption should say Format Font for Future Text.

If the dialog box is a property dialog, the title bar should have the name or description of the object whose properties we are setting. The properties dialogs in Windows work this way. When you request the Properties dialog for a directory named Backup, the title bar says Backup Properties.