Re: [Usability] Re: UI debugging with grep

[Breda McColgan <breda mccolgan sun com>]

I suppose the button text should really be "I Acknowledge", but in some
cases that might make the button larger than the alert or dialog itself
-- which is probably why "OK" got the job in the first place :) 

I imagine that "OK" is easier to translate too.


I can understand the user's frustration though, in cases like that
quoted in the example below. Perhaps a suitable alternative would be
"Dismiss"? The acknowledgement is implicit in the action of clicking the
Dismiss button. I think "Dismiss" does not have the ambiguity of "Close"
-- the user would understand that they are dismissing the alert or
dialog, not the parent application.

But this is just a personal opinion, I'm not a usability expert --
perhaps someone will correct this supposition!


Regards,
Breda.



Ernst De Ridder wrote:
> 
> On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 10:38:58AM +0200, Janne wrote:
> > This is perhaps another instance of "use actions as labels", as was
> > discussed on the list recently. "OK" says nothing about what is actually
> > going to happen. "Close" does. So in this respect, the HIG contradicts
> > itself.
> 
> Not really. It's important here to distinguish between the system and the
> messenger (the GUI). It's is generally attempted to identify a window with
> the data it represents. When you click a <verb> button, you expect the
> data represented by the window - and not the window itself -  to be
> <verb>ed. In the case of an alert box, however, there is no represented
> data; all you can do is tell the window to go away. Putting a <verb> here
> suggests (because the user expects a consistent model behind everything)
> that there is actually something that can be operated upon. But alert boxes
> are pure messengers.
> 
> To put it differently, normal buttons are a command that the messenger
> (dialogue) should pass through to the workers. The button in an alert box is
> a command to the messenger itself.
> 
> As an essential meaningless interjection, OK isn't a bad choice for a button
> in an alert box. Even more so because many users will already be familiar
> with it.
> 
> > >     "I just trashed all your data from the last week"
> > >     "                     [ ok ? ]                  "
> 
> "Your PPP connections will remain open until 24:00h"
> "                            [ Close ]             "
> 
> No matter what verb is suggested, such counter examples will always exist.
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