Re: [evolution-patches] Seeking review for bug #47751 & #47752

[Anna Marie Dirks <anna ximian com>]

Hi Maxx, Ettore, Jeff, and hackers: 

Maxx -- thanks as always for your diligence! I appreciate  your willingness to continue to put effort into this patch.

On Wed, 2003-08-20 at 11:26, Ettore Perazzoli wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-08-20 at 05:19, Maxx Cao wrote:
> > As you suggested, I've changed the warning message to
> > 
> >     "You are about to cancel editing this rule. Are you sure you want
> > to cancel?"
Ok, it seems like we are not all on the same page here with regard to what the recommendations of the Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) are with regard to closing/canceling dialogs. This is my fault -- I should have listed the specific guidelines relating to confirmation alerts back when we were discussing bug #47477. My apologies, guys.

The HIG says: 
(from section "Forgive the User")

We all make mistakes. Whether we're exploring and learning how to use the system, or we're experts who just hit the wrong key, we are only human. Your application should therefore allow users to quickly undo the results of their actions.

If an action is very dangerous, and there is no way to undo the result, warn the user and ask for confirmation. Only do this in extreme cases, though; if frequently faced with such confirmation messages, users begin to ignore them, making them worse than useless.

and also: 
(from section "confirmation alerts") 

Present a confirmation alert when the user's command may destroy their data, create a security risk, or take more than 30 seconds of user effort to recover from if it was selected in error.

So, what does this mean for us in the context of Evolution? 

(Purely from a usability perspective, not thinking about string freeze atm) There is a delicate balance to be struck between 1) warning the user too much, hence annoying her and 2) not warning the user enough, hence letting her lose her data accidentally. My recommendation is that in cases like the druids -- the import druid, the ldap server druid, the pilot set-up druid and the mail account druid-- where the user has to input several pages of (potentially confusing and hard to remember) data, it is good practice for us to show a confirmation alert when the cancel button is clicked, or the esc button is pressed.  

In other cases, like the filter editor, and the vfolder editor, the user doesn't really risk losing very much data if she accidentally closes the dialog. In these cases, it is probably more trouble than it is worth to show the user a confirmation alert. 

Does that make sense to everyone? 

> Also, we are string frozen, and we have been for a while.  While we have
> broken the freeze a number of time before, this seems a bit much. 
> Translators are already having a hard time catching up; let's not make
> their job unnecessarily harder.

Well.. I doubt that anyone meant to make the job of the translator unnecessarily harder. :-) I am pretty sure that we all respect the translators very much, and want to facilitate their work. At any rate,  the guidelines I talked about above fail to take into account the product release cycles; they really only make sense in a perfect world where we just snap our fingers and everything gets translated, packaged and released. 

Since we obviously don't live in such a world, maybe any new alerts that you guys add, Maxx, should only go into HEAD for now? 

Thanks again for all of your work, guys. And sorry again for not sending these guidelines to the list sooner.

best wishes,
Anna

-- 

Anna Marie Dirks <anna ximian com>