Re: Comments on dialog proposal

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

Nils and I discussed this and length with respect to Control Center
preference panes. We propose:

    [Help]              [Undo][Done]

Help is optional and is placed on the left-hand-side. Undo only undoes
the last change. Revert is a more complicated concept, and one that
users are not as familiar with as undo, so we're stealing a page from
the edit menu. Of course, all changes in such a dialogue should be
instant. As with the existing menu proposal, the default option is on
the rhs.

For the sake of discussion, Adam prefers:

    [Help]             [Undo][Close]

I (and nils I believe) favour the former because "Close" sounds
potentially destructive, whereas Done emphasizes that the changes made
will not be lost. Adam prefers "Close" because it specifies what will
actually happen [to the window] when the button is clicked, and thus is
more literal/accurate.

cheers,

-Seth

On 01 Sep 2001 15:00:33 -0700, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> On 01Sep2001 03:08PM (-0400), Julian Missig wrote:
> > I'll leave it up to others to answer the rest... but with instant-apply 
> > dialogs, "Cancel" cancels any actions you did in the dialog since you 
> > opened it, thus acting similarly to how "Revert" acts now - except it 
> > also closes the dialog. This way the user can try settings, see their 
> > effect immdediately, and just Cancel if they don't like them.
> 
> I guess I would rather see Close and Revert buttons - Cancel generally
> cancels an operation that you'v initiated but that has not taken
> effect yet. So it's use in this context may be a bit confusing.
> 
> I think better still would be to have only a Close button - you may
> think this is scary and users will hopelessly mess up their settings,
> but using the Mac OS X System Preferences and the Nautilus preferences
> dialog, I've never needed this feature. It tends to be pretty obvious
> how to put the settings back if I make a change I don't like.
> 
> > And for the record, I like the Mac OS X button ordering and spacing. ;)
> 
> Cool. So do I, now that I'm used to it, except when I have to switch
> back and forth between Mac OS and GNOME.
> 
>  - Maciej
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Usability mailing list
> Usability gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
>