Re: Enter the build sheriff: Jacob.

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

We don't use "yes/no" or "no/yes". I suspect that will bother you too,
but if that is the case, please address that issue rather than knocking
down straw men. "no/yes" is very awkward and would be a big strike
against the G2 button ordering. But we strongly recommend against using
dialogues with "yes", "no" buttons. So in compliant applications this
situation should not occur. 

The loose principal behind this is that dialogues represent actions, and
it is better to phrase them in an active form, rather than as a
conversational interface. Thus figuratively the user performs the
action, rather than consenting to an action the computer performs.

(there are still a number of "no/yes" dialogues in GNOME2, particularly
in gnome games, there just wasn't enough time to convert all of them,
but I think the important dialogues have been converted)

This contains a theoretical justification for the G2 button order:
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-list/2002-February/msg00317.html

This contains the relevant results of a rather informal user test that
at least provides some "user testing evidence":
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-list/2002-February/msg00328.html

-seth

On Thu, 2002-03-14 at 09:27, Alan Cox wrote:
> > When we can't afford the testing, we have to go with prior art and
> > research and general principles based on those, and that is 100% the
> > right approach.
> 
> Prior art without understanding which bits are good or caused by 20 year
> old lawsuits ?  Oh dear me.
> 
> > The problem is that the fastest way to accomodate traditional users is
> > usually to add a configuration option. That's the trap we have to
> > avoid at all costs, in favor of fixing the defaults to address the
> > root issues.
> 
> Broken is still broken. When was the last time you read in a newspaper 
> about someone being asked a no/yes question ?
> 
> Let me quote google 
> 
> 	yes/no	2.3 million hits	(a lot are yes,no,no things
> 	no/yes	640,000 hits		 on both of these due to google)
> 
> 	"yes or no"	441,000
> 	"no or yes"	4870
> 
> Begin to get the picture ?
> 
> 441,000 web page authors know the right ordering. 
> 
> Alan
> 
> 


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