Re: UI Guidelines: Dialogs

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

colin z robertson wrote:

> > And the wording on that button should be chosen carefully-- there's
> > nothing worse than having a message box pop up that says "you've just
> > lost all your data", with a single button labelled "OK"... (or even
> > "Cancel", for that matter!)
> 
> Yes. I'm really not sure what that should be. "OK" is inappropriate
> for something that's not really ok. "Cancel" is misleading. "Close"
> implies modeless, which may or may not be the case... 

I don't think you can sensibly specify in a styleguide what the exact
wording should be in this situation-- it really depends on the message
being displayed.  It's these sort of decisions that keep people like me
in a job  :o)

> What facilities does gtk offer for this sort of thing? 

I believe it supports most of this sort of stuff, or it will in 2.0
anyway.  (Sun are intending to ship GNOME in several languages including
Japanese and Chinese, so it had better!)

> I'm sure we could. Personally, I disagree with you here. I think
> there's enough correspondence between "Cancel" and "Close" for them to
> have the same shortcut. I think that's what would users would expect.

Well, they both close the window, but in almost all cases, "Close" is
actually identical to "OK" (keep current settings and close the
dialog)-- so by extension, what you're really saying is that OK and
Cancel are much the same  :o)

The whole Close/Cancel issue is rather a thorny one, though, and one
we'll probably have to thrash out again when Arlo presents the relevant
bit of the styleguide for review.  For example, if you have
OK/Apply/Cancel buttons in a properties dialog and press Apply, my
preferred approach is to change the Cancel button to Close-- in which
case Esc *should* be the shortcut for Close.  But then there are others
who will argue that you shouldn't go around changing button labels on
the fly under the user's nose...

Cheeri,
Calum.
 
-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems