[Usability] Re: UI debugging with grep

["David Adam Bordoley" <bordoley msu edu>]

Curtis Hovey writes: 

> On Tue, 2003-05-06 at 03:14, Michael Meeks wrote:
> > On Sun, 2003-05-04 at 04:22, Sean Middleditch wrote:
> > > > GNOME alerts are supposed to use OK buttons, not Close buttons. 
> >
> >     I was slightly amazed to see that in the HIG; this used to acutely
> > frustrate people I worked with, when we used windows; a dialog would
> > arrive something like: 
> >
> >     "I just trashed all your data from the last week"
> >     "                     [ ok ? ]                  " 
> >
> > > Is "OK" really a good word to use?  It's a bit meaningless - OK _what_ ? 
> >
> >     I'm no expect, but I suspect the screams of "No it is not OK !!" are
> > perhaps not isolated to my experience.
>
> You forget how even the user then hesitates and considers clicking the
> close button on the window. 'OK' might be common, but it is not right,
> and experienced and unexperienced users are unsettled by it. 

Well the issue there is that message dialog and alerts should just never 
have window buttons (including close) ever (or visible titles). See the HIG. 
I've filed bugs with metacity and there has been discussion about this on WM 
Spec list in the past (i think last january), so we just need to get that 
fixed. 

In general any message dialog should just have an ok button, since the 
dialog provides a message, not a choice of actions, and the ok button is 
simply a way of saying yes i read the message get out of my face. 

dave