Re: [Usability] What's new in HIG 2.0

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Thu, 2004-09-16 at 19:20 -0400, Braden McDaniel wrote:

> Under "Sortable lists", the arrow direction specified is opposite what 
> Microsoft and Apple do (where an up arrow means ascending, and a down 
> arrow means descending). Why depart from the convention established by 
> the most popular desktop operating systems?

Trouble is it doesn't matter which one you pick, you always get somebody
complaining that the other way is better :)  Nautilus and Evolution have
never agreed with each other on which one to use, and bugzilla arguments
have raged about which one is "correct".  (To me, the HIG/Evolution
usage feels more natural-- probably because in real life, most things
naturally go down or forwards unless you force them not to.)  

In reality, I suspect that it doesn't really matter-- if the column
isn't sorted the way the user wants, they'll just click the header until
it is, regardless of the arrow direction.

By all means open a HIG bug if you'd like us to reconsider-- like quite
a few of the new bits in v2.0, they were published before we really had
a chance to discuss them very much (I'd have preferred it was called
v1.1 or v1.99 instead, but hey...)

Cheeri,
Calum.

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

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems