Re: [Usability] inability to experiment

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 23 May 2008, at 17:46, Matthew Nuzum wrote:

> 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.


See, this is where the argument went round in circles last time :)   
Some others on the usability team at the time also suggested this  
approach, but personally I don't think Undo is necessarily appropriate  
for dialogs-- it's rare to make more than one or two changes in a  
dialog at a time, in which case it's usually just overkill.  And when  
you do make multiple changes, they're often quite independent of each  
other, so you don't necessarily want to have to undo your last N  
changes to undo the first one you made.  (Although, sometimes, you  
might.)

Then there's the question of whether a 'Reset to Defaults' button  
would be useful too... probably 'yes', in some cases, but things would  
start getting awfully cluttered if you add a Defaults and a Revert/ 
Undo to every Preferences dialog...

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems