Re: [Usability] Consistency 1: more Stock items, Discard for example.

[Seth Nickell <snickell gmail com>]

http://usability.gnome.org/hig/2.0/windows-alert.html#save-confirmation-alerts

I continue to claim that the best way to get widespread interface
consistency is to make it the easiest way to go. Jody chose to ignore
HIG here, but I suspect if there was a GtkSaveConfirmationAlert he
would have just used it. However, Owen and others do not want to push
policy with technical decisions in GTK+. *shrug*

-Seth

On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 18:55:25 +0000 (GMT), Alan Horkan
<horkana maths tcd ie> wrote:
> 
> I've been noticing lots of inconsistencies recently and one that
> particularly grabbed my attention and serves as a reasonably good example
> is what I will refer to as "Discard" for short.
> 
> When an application or document is closed, users are often asked if they
> wish to Save, Cancel or Discard the Unsaved changes.  Discard perfectly
> describes the action in a terse technical and straighforward way (Gnumeric
> uses it and it seems to be the standard in KDE) but is not the most
> obvious or user friendly way choice of words and quite reasonably various
> applications have tried to come up with better/alternative wordings such
> as "Do Not Save", "Don't Save" (gedit, Mozilla Composer), "Close", "Close
> without Saving" (conglomerate?), "Discard changes".  I even mandaged to
> find two different wordings used within the same application.
> 
> I think it was while looking at "Don't Save" in gedit and noticing both an
> abbreviation and a negative that I had to stop and think until I figured
> out why a relatively trivial detail was really bothering me and I came to
> the conclusion that it was the inconsitency that really bothered me.
> 
> Although we cannot agree on the best label I think we can safely agree the
> same task is being performed and can be standardised and should only be
> changed in one place.  My preferred fix would be to go with Discard and
> provide a good tooltip but I've filed and bug report and I think
> providing a good stock button is the best way to go.
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158008
> 
> The reason I bring this up here is that
> 1) I think it could probably provide a patch for to add a stock
> discard button given a little push in the right direction and i thought
> this was the best place to ask
> 2) and I believe there are other areas where tasks and widgets could be
> standardised with a good API even if we are unsure of the best way to
> present them to end users.
> 
> I believe we can improve consistency and usability and make it easier for
> developers to program by providing a more comprehensive choice of stock
> widgets.
> 
> Sincerely
> 
> Alan Horkan
> Alan's Journal http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
> Abiword is Awesome http://abisource.com
> 
> P.S. apologies for the spelling mistakes.
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