Re: Why modal dialogs are not movable?

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On 4 April 2013 17:46, Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika yahoo com> wrote:

> Could you give a case where the user would be hindered from doing their
> work because the modal dialog can be moved independently of the parent
> window?

users tend to lose the modal dialog in the window stack, and if they
manage to switch away from the window that is currently blocked by a
modal dialog (because they need to look at something else, or because
of an accidental key press) the dialog will not be attached to the
window any more, and the application will look like it's stuck — which
usually leads to the user trying to close the application, or killing
it, with potential loss of data. it's something that's easy to verify
when doing user testing, regardless of the proficiency of the user.

it also makes sense from a visual perspective: a modal dialog is
blocking the window to which it's attached, so it should be visually
connected to the window that spawned it.

there's a greater question pertaining the overall abuse of modal
dialogs in GUI applications; usually, modality is neither needed nor
warranted, but it's not something that can be fixed outside of the
applications themselves.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

--
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi/