Re: [Usability] inability to experiment

["Matthew Nuzum" <newz bearfruit org>]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 10:46 AM, Calum Benson <Calum Benson sun com> wrote:
> There's been a bug open about it for many years... not so much a conscious
> decision as an inability to decide on the best solution, at the time:
> <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95110>
>
> It's certainly something we ought to revisit at some point.

Ah, well, that makes me feel better about the situation. I'll read up
on it this weekend.

In the world of websites, which is where I spend most of my time, we
traditionally always asked users, "Are you sure you want to do this?"
which is very tiring. It's necessary sometimes, since you may be stuck
with the possibly serious consequences. However the trend has been
moving towards giving users the ability to undo things. This feels so
natural and works very well. For example in gmail if you delete an
email the operation is performed immediately but there is a notice
shown (unobtrusively) allowing you to undo the operation.

To me it seems the first step would be to create a UI guideline. The
least intrusive way I can think of to do this would be to keep the
current system in place, with non-atomic changes that take effect
instantly, and an "undo" button to revert.

Instead of using the transactional approach employed in MS Windows,
where you hit the save button to save all changes and cancel to undo
all changes, each click of the "undo" button could undo the last
change progressively until you're back to where you were when you
first started messing with things. Of course, for some applications it
might make sense and a single undo step may be appropriate. I don't
think an "undo" button needs to have a "redo" button to compliment it.
"Undo" is your escape route.

By creating a UI guideline it allows applications to start working
towards the solution in a way that they can be confident about - so
they won't have to undo their changes. :-)

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode