Editing Modal window (section)

===Use cases===

Frequent uses of modal windows include:
* Drawing attention to vital pieces of information. This use has been criticized as ineffective because users are bombarded with too many dialog boxes, and habituate to simply clicking "Close", "Cancel", or "OK" without reading or understanding the message.<ref>[[Joel Spolsky]], User Interface Design for Programmers: [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000062.html Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives]</ref><ref>[[Raymond Chen]], The Old New Thing: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030901-00/?p=42723 The default answer to every dialog box is "Cancel"]</ref><ref>Jeff Atwood, Coding Horror: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000114.html Teaching Users to Read]</ref>
* Blocking the application flow until information required to continue is entered, as for example a [[password]] in a [[Logging (computer security)|login]] process. Another example are [[file dialog]]s to open and save files in an application.
* Collecting application configuration options in a centralized dialog. In such cases, typically the changes are applied upon closing the dialog, and access to the application is disabled while the edits are being made.
* Warning that the effects of the current action are not reversible. This is a frequent [[Interaction design pattern|interaction pattern]] for modal dialogs, but some usability experts criticize it as ineffective for its intended use (protection against errors in destructive actions) due to [[habituation]]. They recommend making the action reversible (providing an "undo" option) instead.<ref name="undo"/>