Re: Dialog buttons

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Wed, Jun 06, 2001 at 04:32:09PM +0100, Calum Benson wrote:
> Liam Quin wrote:
> > Gooerge would be in good company -- in the open look UI, Enter moved to
> > the next text entry in the dialogue until you get to the last
[...]

> This is certainly a fairly sane way to do things, and it would be good
> to hear comments from other members of the accessibility and usability
> contingent on its potential suitability for GNOME.
[..]
Well, I wanted to point out that the bindings George suggested had been
tried before, in an enviroment with extensive (if now out of date)
usability testing.

Even at the time the behaviour of Enter was favoured more by users of
Unix terminal applications than by Macintosh users.  But that general
leaning towards being Unix-like was probably one of the reasons that
the open look environment is still widely used on Solaris, despite Sun
telling everyone to move to CDE.

There are certainly some parts of open look that are best forgotten
today (e.g. the baroque editable scrolling lists).


> One problem we do have with GNOME that was less of an issue in
> OpenLook's day is the wide variety of non-GNOME applications that many
Agreed.

> If we choose a navigation scheme that's radically different from all of
> those, then we could potentially cause more usability problems through
> inconsistency than we would by choosing a sub-optimal approach for
> GTK/GNOME which was nonetheless closer to the way all those others worked.
True, although something similar to but subtley different from each of
the others may actually be more confusing than something very different.
In particular, the former rewards beginners and punishes the intermediate
and advanced user, which is not good for gaining loyalty.

I don't have strong feelings on Enter particularly, except that Gnome has
to stand on its own as an environment, not simply be a compromise of
features copied from elsewhere.

Sorry, lots of words!

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam holoweb net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001