Re: Default button in dialogs

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

Gregory Joseph Merchan wrote:
> 
> Presently there are two competing proposed guidelines for dialog boxes:
> 
> http://www.ndirect.co.uk/~s.robertson/software/ui-guide/html/dialog-guidelines.html
> 
> http://www.delanet.com/~jkmissig/interface-guide.txt

For what it's worth, my personal view on this is that it probably
doesn't matter which button ordering we pick, as long as we make it
stick across the whole desktop.  

The Mac ordering (Help-Cancel-OK) probably had more usability testing
behind it in the early days (although Mac dialogs didn't have a Help
button to worry about), although I don't think anybody's ever really
revisited the issue in any big way since then.  So for that reason I
have a hunch the Mac layout might be marginally superior in isolation.  

However, the M$ Windows ordering is used pretty much everywhere else, so
anyone who runs non-GNOME apps on their desktop (e.g. KDE apps, Motif
apps, Java apps, OpenOffice apps) is almost certainly going to get a
mixture of both layouts if we choose to go with it.  That could be
confusing too, so I guess one question worth considering is whether that
inconsistency would be a usability sacrifice worth making, if we chose
the Mac ordering.

As for the default button argument... I'll probably end up sitting on
the fence about that too, once I've re-read this whole thread again
reminded myself what the issues are  :)

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