Re: UI Guidelines: Dialogs

[thristian atdot org]

On Fri, Feb 16, 2001 at 11:22:12AM +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
> David Grega wrote:
> > Well why don't we use what the web browsers use.  Everyone knows how to use
> > a web browser so if they use back and next in their navigation bars 
> > in their international versions, maybe we should do the same with this
> > situation in gnome
> 
> It's not a bad idea, my only reservation would be what I touched on in
> my last post-- druid buttons and web browser buttons don't do *quite*
> the same thing.  But maybe the distinction is too subtle to bother the
> average user... something else to usability test  :)

I'm not sure if this is offtopic or not... *how* would you test such a
thing? The combinations to be tested are (I guess) Back/Forward,
Back/Next, Prev/Next, Previous/Next, Prev/Forward, Previous/Forward
and any others we think of. The basic scheme is grabbing a Random
User, showing them a bit of paper that looks like a Gnome Druid, with
the two buttons at the bottom appropriately labelled, and ask them...
what? "Which button goes back a step, which one goes forward"? Or more
like "What do you think this button does"?

I can't quite imagine a concise, non-prompting question or series of
questions that would produce any observably different result for any
of those combinations - the mental hesitation induced by the longest
can't be more than half a second, or twice as long as the shortest.
We're talking stop-watch timings here.. and what with the person
(presumably) having to speak, or point at the button, our error is on
the scale of the quantity we're trying to measure.

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