Re: [Nautilus-list] Allowing view components to provide editing (UI and architecture issues)

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:

> Thanks for the suggestion, Calum. The problem I see with this proposal
> is that it's unclear from the text what Cancel does, and in
> particular, how it is different from Don't Save. Any suggestions for that?

Well, I guess you could be even more explicit still with the button
labels:

	[Save and continue] [Continue without saving] [Cancel]

or something like that-- with that particular wording, though, the
labels are now so long and reasonably similar that you could potentially
still mix up the first two, especially if English wasn't your first
language.

As you mentioned to in your description of how it's done on OS X,
spacing could maybe help too, e.g.:

	[Save] [Don't Save]      [Cancel]

but I'm not sure how easily the gtk patch that's gone in to support the
new dialog button layout supports custom spacing on a per-dialog basis. 
If it doesn't, it's maybe better not to set an unmatchable usability
precedent here  :o)

> And finally, I'm not sure it's so smart to change around the button
> ordering for 2.0. Whether Cancel is on the left or right is pretty
> arbitrary, and changing midstream on users is likely to cause mistakes
> among those who have developed habits about which button is where,
> don't you think?

Yes, the changeover could be a little confusing at first, but personally
I think that having every app do it the same way is ultimately more
important than which way we choose to do it (within reason). 

My bigger concern when this debate was raging was that even if GNOME
adopts the Mac-like button ordering 100% consistently, many people willl
still want to run non-GNOME apps on their desktop as well (such as KDE,
Motif, Java or OpenOffice apps), all of which currently still follow the
Windows button ordering convention.  My guess would be that this
inconsistency could be big enough to outweigh the slight usability
advantage of doing things The Mac Way in GNOME-native apps.  (But it is
just that-- only a guess.)

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