The Blandness of Systematic Rules vs. The Delight of Localized Sensitivity

2026-04-02

Marcin Wichary brings attention to this lovely dialog in ClarisWorks from 1997:

Screenshot of an old macOS dialog that says “This copy of This copy of Clarisworks has not been registered yet. Would you like to register..” with buttons that says “Never”, “Later”, and “Now”

He quips:

this breaks the rule of button copy being fully comprehensible without having to read the surrounding strings first, perhaps most well-known as the “avoid «click here»” rule. Never Register/Register Later/Register Now would solve that problem, but wouldn’t look so neat.

This got me thinking about how you judge when an interface should bend to fit systematic rules vs. exert itself and its peculiarities and context?

The trade-off Marcin points out is real: "Never Register / Register Later / Register Now" is fully self-describing and avoids the «click here» rule.

However, it kills the elegant terseness that makes that dialog so delightful. “Now / Later / Never” is three words with no filler and a perfect parallel structure.

It feels like one of those cases where the rule is sound as a guideline but a thoughtful design supersedes the baseline value provided by the rule.

Rules, in a way, are useful structures when you don’t want to think more. But more thinking can result in delightful exceptions that prove better than the outcome any rule can provide.

I suppose it really is trade-offs everywhere:

When you choose to make decisions on a case-by-case basis, the result can be highly-tailored to the specific context of the problem at hand. However, within a larger system, you can start to lose consistency and coherence across similar UX decision points.
When you choose to make system rules override the sensitivities of individual cases, you can lose the magic and delight of finding waypoints tailored exclusively to their peculiarities.

As software moves towards “scale”, I can’t help but think that systematic rules swallow all decision making because localized exceptions become points of friction — “We can’t require an experienced human give thought and care to the design of every single dialog box.”

What scale wants is automated decision making that doesn’t require skill or expertise because those things, by definition, don’t scale.

Then again, when you manufacture upon inhuman lines how can you expect humane outcomes?