[Usability] Re: HIG: Close button

[Daniel Borgmann <spark-mailinglists web de>]

On Tue, 2003-08-05 at 05:18, David Adam Bordoley wrote:
> Daniel Borgmann writes:
> > 
> > Probably not, but it's a dramatic difference in convenience.
> > The "persistent" Epiphany download window reminds me of this each and
> > every time I download or even open a file. :)
> 
> This actually showcases the problem with close buttons. In this dialog there 
> are already 4 buttons. Adding a close button would make it unneccessarily 
> wide and odd looking. However as you have pointed out, close buttons become 
> something a user becomes accustom to, so the lack of its presence is 
> annoying to them. It would be better in this case if users became more 
> accustom to using the window border buttons that they frequently use for 
> main windows, imo. 


Nah... I believe that I'm quite accustomed to the window border close
button, but it's still a PITA to use it regularly because of it's small
size (and I'm using a pretty large title font already to stretch it).
That is the reason why I prefer to press the dialog close button when
it's there. If the window border button would be more large and thus
efficient and convenient to click at, then I would always prefer to
click this because it's always at the same place. I even started to use
keyboard shortcuts for certain commonly closed windows like Nautilus for
that same reason.
The window border buttons just aren't very practical IMO when it comes
to often accessed functions. The question might be, if it's worth
changing that (and if yes, how this could be done). The current solution
with a small but always-present close button on each window and a big
nice extra close button on small secondary windows works pretty well at
least.

Daniel