Re: [Usability] Escape Closing Dialog

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 05:21 -0500, Simon Francis wrote:
> Thats stupid, why do I care what button is on a dialog? Escape should
> simply dismiss it, its just confusing how it closes some and not
> others. Users don't notice that it only does for ones with cancels, it
> seems to be random.

Well, one reason to care is that Close and Cancel buttons do the
complete opposite of each other (keep my changes vs. discard my
changes), and assigning the same keyboard shortcut to opposite actions
can, as you might expect, result in user error.  (Particularly true in
the accessibility case, where the user may not be able to just "glance"
at the buttons in the dialog to work out what's going to happen).

There's no doubt that it's been a bone of contention, though (and the
fact that some apps choose to waive the guideline doesn't help), and
there are bugs open about it.  Feel free to contribute to the
discussions there :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

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

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems