From kde-look Thu Feb 28 12:11:20 2002 From: Dave Leigh Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 12:11:20 +0000 To: kde-look Subject: Re: gnome2 button ordering X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-look&m=101489867000816 On Thursday 28 February 2002 01:09, Navindra Umanee wrote: > I thought this might be a good flame topic for this list: > > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-list/2002-February/msg00317.html > > (start of thread: > http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-list/2002-February/msg00278.html ) Sure, I'll bite, but briefly. In reading the document I clearly got the clear impression that the GNOME team is doing battles with dragons that the KDE team slew 2 years ago (or tamed into a nice mascot) . The author goes through a lot of argument to support the changing of the order of the GNOME buttons. Without exception the reasoning is weak and academic. Weak because at the most he's looking at a savings of milliseconds, which in an open or save dialog is effectively equal to nothing; and academic because speed is not the be-all-end-all of good UI design. Clarity and consistency are. Interestingly, his illustrations are better than his arguments. One thing I do agree with is absolutely clear labeling of dialog buttons. For instance, "Save" and "Don't Save" buttons are better in principle than "OK" and "Cancel" because the button's purpose can't be misinterpreted due to poor wording on the dialog. The order of the buttons is secondary to their clarity of purpose and the consistency of their placement with the context of the environment (here I agree with the author). However, it's important that the buttons chosen agree with the text of the dialog (or vice versa). For example, it would NOT be proper to use "Save" and "Don't Save" if the question requires a "Yes" or "No" answer (as in his example). "Save" and "Don't Save" are proper answers for a question like, "What should I do with this modified document?" but NOT for "Do you want me to save this document?" Also I'd like to point out that in the GUISE of arguing that the "KDE/Windows" way isn't always the best way, the author is REALLY arguing for "Anything but Windows". Again, the actual ordering is insignificant compared to clarity and consistency. Therefore the weak and academic reasoning supports an argument to do it differently for the sake of being different, which is actually weaker than the lemming approach which is superior if for no other reason than it promotes consistency. > There does seem to be a lot of thought being put in GNOME2 usability. > And from what I've seen from screenshots, the Ximian GNOME2 CC is a > *huge* improvement over GNOME1 CC. Apparently, they've cut out quite > a bit of options though, so I wonder how their userbase will react. Probably more enthusiastically than I. Of course, anything that gets GNOME up to the standard we KDE users already enjoy can only improve life. I wish them well. -- dave.leigh@cratchit.org http://www.cratchit.org Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. -- Francis Bacon