Re: UI Guidelines: Dialogs

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

colin z robertson wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Feb 13, 2001 at 07:15:16PM +0000, Calum Benson wrote:

> > Personally I prefer the simpler "Back" and
> > "Next" for druids, but for the startup hints it really does need to be
> > "Previous" and "Next", I suppose...
> 
> I'm not sure about "Back" and "Next". It just doesn't seem right to
> me. I'm happier with "Previous" and "Next" or "Backward" and
> "Forward". In fact "Back", "Backward" and "Backwards" are a very
> strange set of words.

Well, like I said, it was just my personal preference! Given a choice of
synonyms to use in a GUI, I prefer to use the shortest one, provided
there's no great loss of clarity or consistency.  So I don't have any
desperate objection to "Previous", I'd even agree it's a more logical
opposite to "Next", I just don't like the fact that it takes up more
space!

"Back" has also been the norm in help and web browsers for most of the
past decade now, too, so a lot of people will be familiar with it.  I
know that argument falls down with "Next", because web browsers tend to
use "Forward"-- but I still think a druid should use "Next" because it's
guiding you through a fixed sequence of steps, whereas in a browser,
"Forward" could be taking you anywhere.

Of course, if you really can't decide, the best thing would be to do
some usability tests-- it would be pretty trivial to test the different
alternatives with some sketches on a bit of paper, with some suitable
participants.

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