Re: Default button in dialogs

["Blad, John Erling" <john erling blad aftenposten no>]

I once tried to get around the problem with dialogs popping
up and covering important windows. One idea was to use a
message stack to avoid this. Visually it looked like a popup
list with one or more buttons to the right.

I never did any user testing on this so I don't really know
if it would work or not. Sure it worked for me... =)

Mostly this was status-like information, "I'm working",
"I'm not working", "Connection is down", "Connection is up
again". Sometimes multiple messages arrived and only the last
one would be visible. As the user acknowledged with [Ok] the
message was removed from "inbox" to "acknowledged".

The tricky part was some of the messages which needed corrective
actions like "Lost connection" [Reconnect] [Dismiss].

Often one message could be acknowledged by one or a few buttons
but sometimes I needed a real dialog window. I tried various
solutions but in the end I just set aside a dialog area.

Anyone who have done user tests on something like this?

John