Re: [Usability] "Finish" vs. "Close" in gnome-control-center dialogs

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Mar 24, 2006, at 5:27 PM, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> ...
> Consistency is good. But what is consistent is arguable, and usability
> should take precedence. The affirmitive button is still in the lower
> right corner. The difference is now that it is actually affirmitive.
> Close is not an affirmitive label, and the "x" icon is confusing.
> ...

Besides being space-wasting and cluttersome, I think it can only be  
confusing for an instant-apply window to have two buttons that do  
exactly the same thing, no matter how the buttons are labelled.  
Similarly, I think it can only be confusing for instant-apply windows  
to have a row of buttons along the bottom that make them look like  
non-instant-apply dialogs.

This is why, around the time the HIG was first being written, I and  
others recommended that an instant-apply window should have a close  
button in its title bar and nowhere else.
<http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2001-December/ 
msg00129.html>
<http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2002-January/msg00006.html>
Conversely, an alert or dialog should have Cancel/OK/etc buttons at the  
bottom right, and no close button in its title bar; and a progress  
window should have a Cancel or Stop button at the top right, and no  
close button in its title bar. Types of windows that behave differently  
should look different too.

This is not a major issue, though, compared to other problems with the  
desktop background configuration interface, as shown by the  
BetterDesktop videos.  
<http://www.betterdesktop.org/wiki/index.php?title=Data> To summarize:

*   Subjects 7, 23, and 31 had no problems changing the background.
    (Subject 31 was "slightly surprised that there is no OK button, but
    that's okay".)

*   Subjects 10, 13 and 29 had no problems once they found the window.
    (Their slowness in finding it would likely have been solved by
    merging the Programs and System menus. Subject 10 also suffered
    severely from Free Software help writers' continuing weakness for
    including full-size screenshots in their help -- FFS, stop doing
    that!)

*   Subject 15 had one problem: the "Add Wallpaper" button existed when
    it shouldn't.

*   Subject 19, like subject 15, had only one problem once she found
    the window: the "Add Wallpaper" button existed when it shouldn't.
    (Before finding the window, she suffered from the preferences
    windows not being real programs with findable names.)

*   Subject 12 had little problem once he found the window, except for
    being diverted by the "Desktop Colors" controls, which were
    inexplicably still available when a picture was being used instead.

*   Subject 11 was the most confused. She suffered because (a)
    over-large windows covered most of the desktop, and the preferences
    window had no other obvious representation of the current state of
    the desktop background; (b) the list of pictures was passively
    labelled "Desktop Wallpaper" instead of actively "Choose a
    background:", further obscuring the instant-apply effect; (c) the
    "Add Wallpaper" and "Remove" buttons existed when they shouldn't;
    and (d) the presence of the "Close" button implied that something
    else needed to be done first.

Based on those videos, probably the biggest improvement that could be  
made to the Desktop Background Preferences window isn't to fiddle with  
the label of the "Close" button, since that tripped up only one person  
in the published videos. It's to remove the "Add Wallpaper" and  
"Remove" buttons under the list of pictures, replacing them with a  
"Choose a background picture from: [Nature Photos  :^]" option menu,  
with the folder currently selected in the menu determining which  
pictures are shown in the list.

--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/