[Usability]Re: An alternative proposal for instant-apply vs. non-instant-apply

[Matthew Thomas <mpt mailandnews com>]

Someone (Seth?) asked me to add my two cents to this discussion, and
Kenny has been asking for my advice w.r.t. the `types of window' section
in the HIGs, so here goes.

Kenny Graunke wrote:
>...
> _NO_. We *can* assume that we have a close button. The default
> settings will be to use sawfish or another good Window Manager which
> _WILL_ have a close button. Most WM themes I have seen have a close
> button. Why is this? Examining how my friends and family use their
> computers, they _always_ use the close button for windows and
> everything. A [Close] button in the dialog simply wastes screen space
> and clutters the dialogs.

I absolutely agree. It's worse than just the waste and clutter, though.
If you include a `Close' button in any non-modal window, you're actually
slowing the user down.

The relevant principle here is one I call `there's only one obvious way
to do it'. Basically, if you provide two (or more) similarly accessible
methods of achieving the same function, the user will waste more time
trying to decide which method is the fastest than they would have wasted
by choosing the slower of the two. And including a `Close' button in a
window, where the window manager has provided one already, is the
canonical example.

A lot of my work time is spent just sitting watching people use
Microsoft Windows, and I've seen this happen a lot. A secondary window
comes up which the user isn't interested in, and they vacillate between
the close button in the window frame and the `Cancel' or `Close' button
in the window. Usually they eventually choose the one in the window
frame -- I can only guess that it must seem safer than a `Close' button
inside the window which looks like it is really supposed to say `OK'.

Wherever I see a `Close' button in an interface, it's usually the result
of a window which used to be a dialog, or was under the mistaken
impression that it was a dialog, where the programmers (or designers, if
there were any) weren't brave enough to get rid of the buttons
completely when it became a non-modal utility window.

For example, the `Add/Remove Programs' control panel in Windows 95 and
Windows 98 was under the mistaken impression it was a dialog; it had
`OK' and `Cancel' buttons, but changes in the window applied instantly,
and those two buttons did *exactly the same thing* -- they just closed
the window. If you uninstalled a program, `Cancel' wouldn't un-uninstall
it for you. Eventually Microsoft realized this, but rather than rip out
the buttons completely, they left behind an apologetic `Close' button
which does exactly the same thing as the close button in the title bar.

And sure enough, when the admin at work uninstalled a couple of programs
from a Windows 2000 machine one day last week, once he'd finished I
watched him waste about three or four seconds wobbling between the close
button in the title bar and the `Close' button at the bottom of the
window, subconsciously wondering which one to choose.

So, `Close' is on my mental list of labels which buttons should never
have -- along with `Apply', `Yes', and `No'. We do have some nasty
examples of each of those labels in Mozilla, but bugs are filed on all
of them. (Actually, now I think about it, I don't think we stoop quite
so low as having `Apply' anywhere.)

>                           I honestly don't care if people who use TWM
> or such don't have a close button. They can figure out
> some way to deal with it. The vast _majority_ of users have close
> buttons. I think many more people have small resolution screens than
> people who do not have close buttons. This seems like catering to the
> 1.2% against the 98.8%.

Sure. This isn't like the accessibility effort, where we strive to make
GNOME usable for people who have disabilities through no fault of their
own, at the occasional slight expense of those who are fully able. In
this case, users have *deliberately* changed their window manager --
which should be an extremely advanced setting, if indeed it is
configurable in the GUI at all -- from the carefully-chosen default. So
it is entirely their responsibility to make sure their chosen window
manager will let them do something as fundamental as closing a non-modal
window, rather than penalizing the other 98.8 percent of users who use a
non-broken window manager and end up wobbling uncertainly between close
and `Close'.

With regard to this instant-apply discussion in general, I think most of
it is the result of unfortunate terminology -- using the word `dialog'
to refer both to modal windows where changes are applied after `OK', and
to non-modal windows where changes are applied immediately. The latter
are quite a bit less related to dialogs, and more related to documents,
than people here have possibly realized.

-- 
Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla UI Design component default assignee thing
<http://mozilla.org/> -- Yes, yes, I know Mozilla's UI is terrible ...