Re: [Usability] Re: Button ordering

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Fri, 2001-11-02 at 15:16, Alan Cox wrote:
> > http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/proposals/dialog.html
> > "rationale: The eyes of people who read left-to-right tend towards the 
> > upper-left and lower-right corners of boxes. Therefore the action the 
> > user is most likely to perform should be located in the lower-right 
> > corner. With this button order, the action the user is most likely to 
> > perform is always in the same place and is always the most noticeable."
> 
> I've seen the comment. I've yet to see a single cite to the research
> that backs this up. 

This is a general principle that I have encountered a number of times
before, both in print media and in interfaces. Sorry, I don't have a
link to the research to back it up.

> Slavish quoting from MacOS doesn't count.

Alan, I find this rather petty and insulting. You are trying to imply
that our basic rationale is "MacOS does it this way", and that we're
basically copying out of the Mac HIG here, which is bullshit. Sorry, we
don't have user testing labs to test every decision we make, and I
assure you that somebody will disagree with almost every decision. 

"Show me the research" or "show me user testing" is a throwaway phrase
that is incredibly hard to argue against but isn't really helpful to the
situation. We don't *have* the ability to perform the research for most
usability choices, and in many many cases the necessary research is not
widely published because its done by *companies* with an interest in
being the primary ones to gain the benefit from the information.

We *have* given reasons and we've internally gone through a lot of
discussion about this. I'm sorry if think our reasoning is slavish
quotation from MacOS.

-Seth