Re: [Usability] Button ordering

[jacob berkman <jacob ximian com>]

On Fri, 2001-11-02 at 15:28, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> I've just applied Gregory Merchan's patch in:
> 
>  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56331
> 
> To make the GTK+ standard dialogs button ordering conform to the gnome
> usability project's dialog proposal.
> 
>  http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/proposals/dialog.html
> 
> This is Mac style with the "action" button at the lower right
> hand corner, as opposed to what we've done in the past - Windows style
> with the default button at the left.
> 
> So, 
> 
>   [ Help ]                 [ Cancel ] [   OK   ]
> 
> Not:
> 
>   [ Help ]                 [   OK   ] [ Cancel ]
> 
>  * Familiarity is important; I'm feeling quite disoriented by
>    the change and other of our users will probably be disoriented
>    too, both existing GNOME users and users coming from Windows.

so i just ported bug-buddy to use GtkMessageDialog rather than
GnomeMessageBox, and this change totally fubars me - i repeatedly click
on the wrong button.

the problem is that the dialogs are too similar to the old ones - there
is not enough visual queue that these dialogs have a different button
layout than the gnome 1 ones.  on a mac the button ordering doesn't seem
to throw me off, as i am already disoriented.

what is worse is that when you use GnomeMessageBox, you get the gnome 1
behaviour as well!!  it should go without saying that if this gtk change
is staying, the gnome stuff needs to be fixed, but i wouldn't be
surprised if it isn't possible to emulate the old behaviour and use the
new layout, but i haven't looked into it.

with the fact that all of our installed base and the majority of desktop
users throughout the world have the ordering the other way, i think this
is a mistake.

we are not out to create a utopian desktop environment with everything
done perfectly.  if we were, we would probably not be using unix, c, x,
etc.

(and isn't the no / cancel option quite often the default / preferred
action?  this change boinks that.)

jacob
-- 
"Beat mixing is 10000 times more fun than even video games."
	-- bt