Re: UI Guidelines: Dialogs

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

Jorg Rathlev wrote:

> No, they do very different things!

Certainly they do in one respect-- as your quote eloquently describes!  

But at a higher level of abstraction, you could argue that a browser's
Back/Forward buttons *are* the same as a druid's: they both move you one
step at a time in either direction along a linear path of pages that you
have visited, do they not?  And they both allow you to back up and
choose to go down a different path if you went the wrong way.

In fact, you *have* to understand this model before you can work out
what the "Forward" button in a web browser is actually for-- I remember
it wasn't immediately obvious to me when I started surfing the web! 
(And the original Microsoft Help browser, which had Back, Forward, <<
and >> buttons which all did different things was just a nightmare for
new users...)

I'm not disagreeing with what you say about the differences between web
browsing and druids.  It's just worth remembering that not all users'
mental models of a system are the same.  And in particular, if they come
across a new thing that looks similar to an old thing they've used
before, they'll quite naturally try to predict the behaviour of the new
thing based on how the old one worked.  And if the two things behave
similarly-but-not-quite-the-same, they may never build up the correct
mental model of the new thing, and just end up very confused!

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