Re: [Usability] Friendly words from an application

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Kalle Vahlman wrote:

> Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 03:37:54 -0800
> From: Kalle Vahlman <kalle vahlman gmail com>
> Reply-To: zuh iki fi
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: Re: [Usability] Friendly words from an application
>
> On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 15:38:03 +0000 (GMT), Alan Horkan
> <horkana maths tcd ie> wrote:
> >
> > I was pretty sure the Guidelines recommended against "Friendly Words" and
> > getting carried away with politeness or saying please and thank you all
> > over the place.
>
> Of course. I still feel awkward whenever sudo (or was it su?)
> apologizes to me in finnish. But I was actually referring to some part
> of the HIG that recommends using positive expressions instead of
> negative. Unless it was somewhere else, I could be wrong of course.

Oh yeah, Show rather than Hide.  That does help yes.

> > Asking a users if they really want to leave seems like a patronising
> > question to me, why else would they have hit the Exit/Quit/Leave button?
> >
> > If the application was smart enough to save the current information and
> > not lose anything it should be able to quit safely without needing to ask
> > for confirmation before doing so.
>
> Oh, sure. Never ever did I mean to imply a quit confirmation dialog to
> be a good thing _unless_ the user is in risk of losing data by closing
> the app.
>
> I was merely pointing out that I wasn't annoyed by the dialog as much
> as the typical quit confirmation alert, because the program actually
> trusted me to know better than itself. Something that is quite
> annoying in applications if not easily overridden.

Thanks for your interesting comments.

- Alan