Re: UI Guidelines: Dialogs

[colin z robertson <c z robertson ndirect co uk>]

On Tue, Feb 13, 2001 at 11:21:48AM +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
> 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)

Ok. But there are some common situations where we can make general
recommendations:

"Close" for About dialogs various other types of information display
dialogs.

"OK" for mild warnings? "Close" for serious warnings? And I suppose
there are some warnings where "Continue" might be appropriate.

Or are there more subtleties to this that I've missed?


> > 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!)

Great. So should the guidelines then describe these things relative to
reading direction? Or should it describe them in reference to some gtk
concepts?


> > 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)

I suppose what I'm saying is that Close has some of the
characteristics of Cancel ("Get this dialog out of my way") and some
of the characteristics of OK ("Things are how I want them to be"). And
remember that we're trying to eliminate "OK" as a label.


> 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...

Well, hang on. It really bothers me that there's a Cancel button there
in the first place, because as soon as you press Apply it no longer
behaves as it should, which is precisely the point at which you want
it to behave as it should. And you really should not be changing
button labels like that. That's just plain evil.

Also, I find the OK/Apply/Cancel combination a bit odd. Essentially OK
combines Apply with closing the window. While that might add a bit of
efficiency by eliminating the need for a second click, it doesn't seem
very intuitive. I'm not sure the trade-off is worth it.

colin

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