Guido van Rossum - Google+ - There's a new UI annoyance that I see more and more on…

I actually nuked a memory card on a digital camera because of this issue. I was messing around in the menu and hit the option to Format the card. It presented me with two options, "Confirm" and "Cancel."

When I pushed Up, the colors of the two options switched. If I pushed up, they switched again. When I pushed down, they switched. If I wasn't already aware that Yellow background, Blue foreground meant "Selected" (which I wasn't), then I would have no idea which one I'd select when I pushed the button.

In hindsight, I should have just powered down the camera, but I didn't think to do that until after I rolled the dice and formatted the card. Because there were only two choices (three would let me see that two were "inactive" and one was "active") and because the selection wrapped around from top to bottom (with two options, that meant that my selection buttons both acted like a toggle), I couldn't tell which was active.

If it had been a selection dot or something more clear, I would have known which was active.