[Usability]Re: An alternative proposal for instant-apply vs. non-instant-apply

[Adam Elman <aelman users sourceforge net>]

At 6:25 PM -0400 9/7/01, James R Eagan wrote:
> On 07 Sep 2001 12:48:21 -0700, Kenny Graunke wrote:
>
> >  _NO_. We *can* assume that we have a close button. The default settings will
> >  be to use sawfish or another good Window Manager which _WILL_ have a close
> >  button. Most WM themes I have seen have a close button. Why is this?
> >  Examining how my friends and family use their computers, they _always_ use
> >  the close button for windows and everything. A [Close] button in the dialog
> >  simply wastes screen space and clutters the dialogs. I honestly don't care
> >  if people who use TWM or such don't have a close button. They can figure out
> >  some way to deal with it. The vast _majority_ of users have close buttons. I
> >  think many more people have small resolution screens than people who do not
> >  have close buttons. This seems like catering to the 1.2% against the 98.8%.
>
> It may the case that you don't need to worry about those users without
> close buttons on their windows, but that doesn't mean that one should
> eliminate the close buttons (whatever the label) from the dialog.  The
> vast majority of windows can be closed with a button on the window or
> with a pull-down menu.  The exceptions are so rare that whenever I
> encounter them, I find myself pondering for all of about 5 seconds
> before I remember the close button on the title bar.

Do you generally use the actual pull-down menu or a key binding?  I 
can't remember the last time I actually used a pull-down menu to 
close a window; I nearly always use either an application key binding 
or the WM key binding to close a window.  I think it's important that 
there _be_ a standard WM key binding to close a window, but assuming 
there is (and there will be in the common case), it's not necessary 
to have a close button for a dialog box which is what I would call an 
"object property" box, as opposed to what you describe below:

> The dialog ought to typically walk the user through a series of
> operations.  The button on the dialog is the user's way of communicating
> his intentions to the dialog ("no, i didn't mean to do that", or "I'm
> done now", or whatever).  Having the only way to exit that conversation
> being clicking on the close-box breaks the conversation away from the
> focus of the rest of the dialog.

This is a specific kind of dialog box.  Some dialog boxes are really 
there just to modify properties of an object; in that case the dialog 
box is not so much enabling a conversation but rather collecting a 
set of controls; the user's attention is focused on the object in 
question.

>  > > If we use this strategy with no buttons in instant-apply dialogs and
>  > > only relying on WM buttons, a user can easily put himself in the
>  > > position of an unusable desktop just by trying out some themes...
>  >
>  > So they can figure out how to close the windows via some other way (a
> >  keybinding, a right click menu on the titlebar, or ...). Or they can change
> >  back to a theme that isn't so ridiculously broken.
>
> I thought we were trying to make things easier to use....

We are, but that doesn't mean we should make it possible to do things 
in multiple, redundant ways; we want to minimize the visual and 
conceptual clutter the user has to deal with.

Adam
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