intelligent dialogs

["gavin hurley" <gadge47 hotmail com>]

Up 'til now, Gnome (and most Gnome apps) seem to be following the Microsoft
style of dialog design. This is unfortunate because there is another style,
well exemplified by Macintosh, that seems clearly better. Actually, it's not
so much that the Mac style is better as that the Microsoft style is bad.

The Microsoft style is to throw up some buttons with generic labels (like
[Yes] [No] [Cancel]) then put up a bunch of explanatory text that tells you
what clicking on those buttons actually means. "Do you want to save
changes?"

The Mac style tends to label the buttons according to what they do ([Don't
Save] [Save] [Cancel]). The dialog text still explains the situation but the
user usually doesn't have to expend much effort to figure out what to press
to accomplish her goal.

If I've convinced you already you can skip to the end. If not, press on.

The Microsoft style is bad for a bunch of reasons.

It's time consuming: figuring out which button does what requires reading
and understanding the text. And you pretty much have to do it every time you
come up against the dialog (how can you know what "Yes" means unless you
read the question?).

It's error prone: if you misread the dialog, or didn't read it at all, or
mismapped what you want to do onto the wrong button, you're going to end up
doing the wrong thing.

It's inflexible: if dialogs can only (easily) have buttons like [Yes] [No]
[Ok] [Cancel] etc. then the text of the dialog is going to be a fairly
tortured question or else it's going to have to ditch the question idea
altogether and say "Clicking on this button does this. Clicking on that
button does that. etc".

It's bizarrely inconsistent: if the dialog presents you with a yes or no
question, [Yes] and [No] buttons fit in pretty well. But [Cancel] doesn't
really fit. What does it mean? It doesn't really have any obvious
relationship to the question at all and it usually isn't even explained in
the text.

It's dangerously inconsistent (rehash of an early point): because Microsoft
dialogs try to map all sorts of actions onto just a few labels, you end up
having overloaded button labels. "Save changed to Untitled 1 [Yes] [No]
[Cancel]" vs. "Exiting will discard changes to Untitled 1. Exit anyway?
[Yes] [No] [Cancel]"

---------

So I guess I'm asking for a few things. For the responsible people to
redesign the pre-fab/built-in/default Gnome dialogs. To make it easy for
developers to create and use dialogs with intelligent button labels. For
someone (maybe someone at Helix-Code, or RHAD Labs, or Eazel) to write up
some good guide-lines so more developers will think to design better
dialogs.

Does anyone else think this might be a good idea? Is there a good place to
start if I want to help out?



-gsh