Re: [Usability] close icon is misleading

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Wed, 2003-09-10 at 02:21, Maxwell Terpstra wrote:

> The problem is the icon on the close button in any of the gnome
> settings dialogues.  The 'X' icon implies that changes made in the
> dialogue will be cancelled when the button is pushed, and thus there
> appears to be no way to keep the settings without leaving the window
> open.

Yes, this is certainly an issue.  IMHO the problem is really that the
settings windows (as they are currently designed, with a big "Close"
button in the bottom-right corner) shouldn't really have 'X' buttons on
their titlebar at all, because its meaning is ambiguous as you say.  But
IIRC this isn't currently implementable.

Having said that, within the constraints of the current UI guidelines 
(i.e. without removing the big "Close" button, which is a different
debate), what can we do any better to indicate that it will both close
the window and keep the settings, and that if it didn't keep them, it
would be labelled "Cancel" instead?  The only thing I can think of is
some tooltip ugliness... I suspect this might be one of those things
that people will just have to learn. 

(It's not a particularly new concept at least, Windows and Macintosh
both use Close buttons to mean the same thing as GNOME does-- just not
as widely, in the case of Windows.)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems