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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: RFC: Message Box issues
From:       zander () kde ! org
Date:       2004-10-04 11:42:38
Message-ID: 20041004114238.GA30825 () factotummedia ! nl
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On Mon, Oct 04, 2004 at 01:30:27PM +0200, Jaros?aw Staniek wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> There are two issues:
> 1. Assume you've got a question message
> 
>     "Do you want to format this partition?"
>               {{Yes}} {No}
> 
> We can agree, this is really a mix of warning and question. Currently with
> KDE, it's only required to blindly press Enter key to answer "Yes" for this
> question because it's highlighted as default. (I've got other cases similar
> to this within my own application, like Kexi "Do you want to remove this
> database"). Any of such messages are dangeruos if user is too lazy/bored to
> think twice :) At least from my experience user lazy/bored users do exist and
> so quite often.
> The proposal is to allow programmers to set {{No}} button by default for such
> cases. This was even already implemented few months before (called Dangerous
> option for KMessageBox), but now it's removed.

Since we only show "are you sure.." kind of dialogs when a dangerous funtion
is performed there is no reason not to make the default 'yes'.

I have learned over the years that making these questions harder and more
annoying will always backfire since users stop reading them and basically
go into a mode of 'how to get rid of this annoying dialog'.
Keeping things in normal mode and as little annoyance as possible (but
still significantly more then default) is the only way to make sure that
users are actually going to read and pay attention to those dialogs.

In short;  having the 'save button' as default is not good usability.
We decided on that fact in the KDE3 meeting (2 years ago).


> 2. Pressing letters as keyboard shortcuts for message boxes. Currently e.g.
> for buttons
>             {{Yes}} {No}
> 
> there are keyboard shortcuts : Alt+Y, and Alt+N.
> The proposal is to add possibility (by default) for presing Y and N keys
> (accordingly for Yes and No answer), Alt+ shortcut could remain of course.

I was under the impression that more and more users wanted explicit dialogs:
    "are you sure you want to format your partition?"
    "format" / "no"
which makes the 'y'/'n' buttons kind of useless..  How does the Mac do that?

-- 
Thomas Zander

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