more difficult to review the main program window looking for errors/information smaller viewports have acclimatized users to interacting with a sequence of small screens each with a define action, rather than viewing all contextual info at once on a big screen Example alert() is the name of the method used in JavaScript to spawn an alert dialog. The argument to the method is the text to be displayed in the window. A dialog created this way will contain a yellow triangle warning symbol (similar to those found on electrical devices), the text of the warning message, and a single button saying "OK" which will close the window. Such a dialog also assumes control over the user interface, preventing the user from proceeding with any other task in the application until the dialog window is closed. Criticism Modal alert dialogs are prone to produce mode errors due to their unrequested nature. A study to appear at the Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society showed that when a user dialog appears, the primary goal of users is typically to get rid of them as soon as possible even without any analysis of the causes for the dialog appearance. When asked, users dismissed any dialog box as a distraction from their assigned task. This is explained by a common complaint about the wording of the message in the alert box, which is often incomprehensible to the user. In applications without proper user-centered design, the developers decide the text of the message, including terms and concepts from the mental model of the programmer, not of the user's view of the world. Since the dialog doesn't work to accomplish the user needs, the common reaction will be to dismiss the alert without further consideration. Dangerous actions should be undoable wherever possible; a modal dialog that appears unexpectedly or which is dismissed by habituation will not protect from the dangerous action. This problem can be avoided by providing an undo action instead of a warning, or showing the warning in an infobar instead of a dialog. Another recognized problem is that, as a modal window, the dialog blocks all workflow in the program until it is closed. Users may not recognize that the dialog requires their attention, leading to confusion about the main window being non-responsive, or causing loss of the user's data input. This often happens in data entry forms after an error