UI design

This is the way the menu looks when I try to recharge my prepaid account on Airtel. It takes me to my bank site (Login page) to pay after I select the plan. For some reason if I try to go back (leave the login page and go back to the Airtel app) it pops up a window and asks ‘do you want to cancel the transaction’ and the options are ‘Cancel’ and ‘OK’. You press ‘Cancel’ thinking that it will cancel the transaction. This does not cancel the transaction and go back to the previous screen, instead it stays there. If you press ‘OK’ then it takes it as OK for canceling and goes back to the Airtel app page. So the way this works is, pressing ‘Cancel’ means I canceled the canceling of the transaction, which means I want to go ahead with the payment. If you make the ‘Cancel’ as ‘No’ and ‘OK’ as ‘Yes’ for the question ‘Do you want to cancel the transaction?’, then it makes a lot of sense.

UI design or for that matter writing software is all about making the software usable by the end user. It does not work if it is built to satisfy the techie who coded those screens. This broadly reflects the gap between the programmer who builds the code and the product owner who visualizes the user’s needs in a domain.