Re: [Usability] HIG Clarification for "Close Without Saving" button

["Liam R. E. Quin" <liam holoweb net>]

On Tue, 2005-02-01 at 10:56 +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-02-01 at 11:41, Patrick Costello wrote:
> > Therefore, the label in the original message would be:
> > "Close Without Saving".
> I'd be happy to update the HIG to reflect that, too.  Although as it
> happens I prefer "Don't Save" anyway (contraction and all)-- if it's
> good enough for the Mac... :)

The right question, I think, is, "what choices does the user need?"

Consider quitting an application and getting the message,
"You have several documents open and one or more has
unsaved changes"
Stupid computer! *WHICH* documents have unsaved changes? Tell me!

So now I want to go through each document in turn to see if I need
to save the changes.

The dialogue, then, might usefully be --

There are five documents open with unsaved changes.
[ ] throw away all my work and quit anyway
[ ] I pressed quit by mistake, sorry, I know I'm stupid
[ ] close the documents you can, and I'll work on the others
[ ] show me a list of open documents so I can see what to do

Well, OK, maybe the messages could be less hateful.

Another approach is "direct editing" in which changes are applied
instantly to the on-disk document.  Gnome already has this in some
areas -- some preferences/settings boxes use the "instant apply"
paradigm, although this greatly increases the importance of the
undo mechanism.

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin
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