Cancel - OK
-
Forogar wrote:
Is just plain wrong. The OK or "moving forward" button should be at the bottom right. The Cancel or "give up and go back" button should be to the left of it similar in action and placement to Forward and Back buttons on browsers - except they are at the top.
And people should fish with a rifle instead of a fishing pole. It's fish hunting season. Point being, just because something is done one way in a different environment doesn't mean it should be done that way everywhere.
Jeremy Falcon
Not a bad idea at all: you bind the fishing line to the end of the rifle, and when you get bored you shoot the competition :cool:
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto) Point in case: http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/02/apple_gotofail_lessons[^]
-
Colin Mullikin wrote:
That is his one and only reason
Unfortunately it is a good reason. One thing I learned is that users complain a lot, but very often they adapt within a few hours of the rollout. Those that can't adapt are those that couldn't work with it in the first place. Besides 200 dialogs is not thát much. Yes it is a bloody annoying and tedious job. it will keep you busy for the better part of the day, but that's about it. But I can imagine it's not much fun to be told to do something when you did it differently for so long.
V.
(MQOTD rules and previous solutions)But before they adapt, your highest paying customer forces the account manager to tell you to put it back as it was in the first place. Mean while, the lowest paying customers have already adapted to the change and complain when you change it back.
-
While I would love for this to be an option, it would require some work. We don't really have an ancestor form with the OK and Cancel that all other forms inherit from. If we did, it would be a nice easy switch, but as it is, the placement of the OK and Cancel buttons has to be switched in roughly 200 forms. We could potentially add a bit of code into each form that would dynamically change the position as you suggest, but I'm not sure it would be worth the work. Also, it would just spawn a new debate of what should be the default setting: the new way or the old way...
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
Colin Mullikin wrote:
We don't really have an ancestor form
If you don't already have one, consider introducing it, and think about other functionality that you then could easily implement for all the forms combined, with relatively low effort! I once worked on such an application (only about 35 forms IIRC, but then we were only a team of two), and got a request to introduce a feature that would affect most of these forms. Due to the number of forms and required amount of change, the request was never fulfilled. Much later we finally decided we couldn't go on without a common base form and just implemented it. Then I stumbled upon the old request and realized it could now be done with just a few hours of work... I should add that these forms were derived from system classes, so we had to actually slip our own common base class in-between the existing class hierarchy.
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto) Point in case: http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/02/apple_gotofail_lessons[^]
-
For several months now, one of our testers has been pushing to get the OK and Cancel buttons switched in every single dialog in our application (roughly 200 dialogs). His only reasoning for this is that the way we do it (OK in bottom right corner, Cancel to the left of it) is the opposite of what Microsoft does throughout Windows(Cancel in bottom right corner, OK to the left of it). That is his one and only reason. He fails to acknowledge that switching it will annoy the hell out of every single person that uses our software (thousands of people). The next time he brings it up I might punch him in the face. :mad:
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
I thought it worked like this: Windows OK Cancel Mac Cancel OK Mobile put the most likely button to be pressed closest to my right thumb, please! (Especially important in landscape mode and as phone screens become larger) I noticed that Rovio changed a few of its prompts between Angry Bird versions which my thumb appreciated. In my brain it should follow the local reading order. English L-R, OK/default Cancel. Arabic R-L, Cancel OK/default
-
But before they adapt, your highest paying customer forces the account manager to tell you to put it back as it was in the first place. Mean while, the lowest paying customers have already adapted to the change and complain when you change it back.
-
For several months now, one of our testers has been pushing to get the OK and Cancel buttons switched in every single dialog in our application (roughly 200 dialogs). His only reasoning for this is that the way we do it (OK in bottom right corner, Cancel to the left of it) is the opposite of what Microsoft does throughout Windows(Cancel in bottom right corner, OK to the left of it). That is his one and only reason. He fails to acknowledge that switching it will annoy the hell out of every single person that uses our software (thousands of people). The next time he brings it up I might punch him in the face. :mad:
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
Colin Mullikin wrote:
For several months now, one of our testers has been pushing to get the OK and Cancel buttons switched in every single dialog in our application (roughly 200 dialogs). His only reasoning for this is that the way we do it (OK in bottom right corner, Cancel to the left of it) is the opposite of what Microsoft does throughout Windows(Cancel in bottom right corner, OK to the left of it). That is his one and only reason. He fails to acknowledge that switching it will annoy the hell out of every single person that uses our software (thousands of people).
Testers don't write specs or or code. They test. That is all they do. As long as the interface adheres to the functional specs, the testers shouldn't even be talking about it. It wastes the team's time during the bug triage process. If the testers don't have functional specs to work from, that the Business Analyst's fault.
Colin Mullikin wrote:
The next time he brings it up I might punch him in the face.
Ahhhhh, the Outlaw Programmer's favorite conflict resolution methodology. I like it. :)
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-----
When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013 -
For several months now, one of our testers has been pushing to get the OK and Cancel buttons switched in every single dialog in our application (roughly 200 dialogs). His only reasoning for this is that the way we do it (OK in bottom right corner, Cancel to the left of it) is the opposite of what Microsoft does throughout Windows(Cancel in bottom right corner, OK to the left of it). That is his one and only reason. He fails to acknowledge that switching it will annoy the hell out of every single person that uses our software (thousands of people). The next time he brings it up I might punch him in the face. :mad:
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
I would not only punch you in the face, I'd probably break skull of anyone who tries to make me "think RTL"! :mad: Try asking your friends "Do you not need coffe?", "Are you not going home already?". After twenty or so times they'll stop talking to you or beat the [random code] out of you. PS: is't not that tester's fault that he got dragged into gay community. :rolleyes: PS/2: I think I'll start saving money so I can travel to where GTK developers gather and start a massacre :)
-
You're not getting much joy from this one are you! I'm afraid I disagree with your stand on this one as well, standards and consistency are what make a user experience easy. Having said that I can sympathise with you when YOUR standard pre-dates Microsofts latest set of decisions. I still use a DAL that pre dates Entity Framework by a decade :sigh:
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
Standards and consistency should be handled in the design phase - NOT the test phase. The tester should just STFU, especially if this issue has been previously marked as "not a bug", or moved to the product backlog.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
-----
You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
-----
When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013 -
The period in my life when I had my highest frequency of swearing loudly at my office desk was when we used an editor that at exit might display a warning (this was before the mouse was common, so you responded through the keyboard: "You have not saved the last modifications to the file. Do you want to save it before exiting? (Y/N)" Of course you would immediately hit the "Y" key. Then we switched to another editor that had very much of the same style user interface, but it would give the warning: "You have not saved the last modifications to the file. Do you really want to exit without saving? (Y/N)" Obviously, from old habit, you hit the "Y" key. Then you would swear loudly and be grumpy for the rest of the day. Moral: Don't play games with the user's old habits.
-
It's guaranteed that most of your customers will complain if you change it since they will need to retrain all their users for that minor change. No doubt the original decision to place the buttons in the order you prefer was so the new users would cancel rather than choosing the usual ok.
-
Oh sure - there is no need to repeat exactly the same example. I certainly would insist that it is not very different; it has to do with old habits. The CUA prescribed that the button to click to termminate a dialog normally should be the bottom rightmost one, and in the old days, all applications followed that recommendation. Then some software turned up where following the habit of clicking the bottom right button would NOT confirm all your entries, but cancel them. That is very much the same as following your old habit of responding "Y" to a yes/no question, without reading the label. You loose your modifications is both cases.
-
Microsoft published a design guide, in the before the before, that suggested putting the OK button on the right was correct and that most user expected that. Then when Microsoft switched to placing OK buttons on the left, the guide mysteriously disappeared. It was a well written research article, to this day I wish I had printed it. My personal opinion is that the confirmation should be in the same location every time and should not float. Placing it on the left makes it float. For example on an OK only dialog the OK button will be in a different place from the OK Button in an OK Cancel Dialog. Long story short, just because Microsoft does something doesn't make it correct. More importantly I agree with your button placement, and furthermore I like using the word furthermore.
Need custom software developed? I do custom programming based primarily on MS tools with an emphasis on C# development and consulting. "And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" -- Robert Frost "All users always want Excel" --Ennis Lynch
Ennis Ray Lynch, Jr. wrote:
just because Microsoft does something doesn't make it correct
Hear hear!
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
-
You're not getting much joy from this one are you! I'm afraid I disagree with your stand on this one as well, standards and consistency are what make a user experience easy. Having said that I can sympathise with you when YOUR standard pre-dates Microsofts latest set of decisions. I still use a DAL that pre dates Entity Framework by a decade :sigh:
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
Mycroft Holmes wrote:
I still use a DAL that pre dates Entity Framework by a decade
:thumbsup: As do I and probably most experienced practitioners.
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
-
For several months now, one of our testers has been pushing to get the OK and Cancel buttons switched in every single dialog in our application (roughly 200 dialogs). His only reasoning for this is that the way we do it (OK in bottom right corner, Cancel to the left of it) is the opposite of what Microsoft does throughout Windows(Cancel in bottom right corner, OK to the left of it). That is his one and only reason. He fails to acknowledge that switching it will annoy the hell out of every single person that uses our software (thousands of people). The next time he brings it up I might punch him in the face. :mad:
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
I agree that it should have been standardized to match the platform (Windows) your software runs on. Changing it now would be an annoyance to your users initially, but they'd get used to that. That said, is it worth the time to do it? Well, you'd have to determine that. That said, the appropriate thing to do is use your time machine to go back and tell your designers to do it "right " the first time. ;)
-
Way back, in the old days when MS and IBM were friends, was developed a standard called the Common User Access, CUA, giving the common guidelines for Windows, OS/2 and Motif user interfaces. The CUA was published as an IBM document, but was endorsed by MS (and I believe several other companies). Windows 3 was developed in close to 100% adherence to the CUA rules. The CUA stated clearly that normal completion of a dialog is done by clicking the button in the lower right corner. In other words, OK to the right. The first CUA rule (at least among the essential ones) were the location of the Help menu: CUA requires it to be pushed to the very right on the menu line. I don't remember when MS decided to move it together with the other pulldown menus; that could be in Win 3.11. We started out with consistency where you by instinct clicked the bottom right button to complete normally, to a transition period where an increaing fraction of the applications made you follow your instincts, swear, and redo the entire dialog, this time reading the button texts closely, to the current situation where everything is so inconsistent and free of rules that you cannot rely on instincts but must read all the buttons anyway. ("But OUR software is consistent" - sure, the good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. Most customers buy software from several different vendors.) Whenever I make user interfaces, I follow the CUA rule of normal termination being the bottom right button. Nowadays, all user must read the button labels anyway, so this is as good a choice as any other. Or even better, since I can justify my choice by referring to a user interface standard document. (True enough: It was published more than 25 years ago, but it is far better than nothing).
Member 7989122 wrote:
that could be in Win 3.11
No, Win 3.11 was still good.
Member 7989122 wrote:
the location of the Help menu: CUA requires it to be pushed to the very right on the menu line
I remember that and I wish I could still put it there, but WinForms doesn't seem to allow it. :mad: :thumbsup:
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
-
For several months now, one of our testers has been pushing to get the OK and Cancel buttons switched in every single dialog in our application (roughly 200 dialogs). His only reasoning for this is that the way we do it (OK in bottom right corner, Cancel to the left of it) is the opposite of what Microsoft does throughout Windows(Cancel in bottom right corner, OK to the left of it). That is his one and only reason. He fails to acknowledge that switching it will annoy the hell out of every single person that uses our software (thousands of people). The next time he brings it up I might punch him in the face. :mad:
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
So you don't use the "Default" MessageBoxes? Did you (your company) create special "MessageBoxes" with Cancel/OK too? :omg: If you did so - I hope you also created your own "MessageBoxButtons" enumeration ;-) (MessageBoxButtons.OKCancel MessageBoxButtons.CancelOK
-
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
Here's the thing the article does not account for, platform consistency.
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
Consistency man. Who cares about what what some guy wrote on his blog.
Wow, I guess you just skipped over the whole section about Platform Consistency not being good enough:
Quote:
It’s also a popular excuse to use to not think deeply about the design problems users face. What’s the benefit of following a design convention, if one doesn’t know why it exists, or if it’s right for users in the first place?
If consistency becomes your sole argument, then there is no need to refute anything else. You have chosen the point that no design rationale is important because all that matters is what everyone else does. Okay, I do not want to get into a big argument, but my observation is that there is no real consistency in the wide world of UI. I have seen places where Cancel | OK is used instead of OK | Cancel and that means that everyone always has to read the screen carefully. Inconsistency is consistent.
Leslie K. wrote:
Wow, I guess you just skipped over the whole section about Platform Consistency not being good enough:
Nope, I just don't agree with it.
Leslie K. wrote:
If consistency becomes your sole argument, then there is no need to refute anything else. You have chosen the point that no design rationale is important because all that matters is what everyone else does.
You're absolutely correct, and ironically enough I don't always copy the herd, so go figure. However, 9 out of 10 times when I see UIs that swap the order, the UI has no thought, is ugly, etc. So, while I totally agree with this, in practice, I see it being wrong as the result of laziness. But, I do respect anyone that puts thought into it, even if I don't agree with them.
Jeremy Falcon
-
For several months now, one of our testers has been pushing to get the OK and Cancel buttons switched in every single dialog in our application (roughly 200 dialogs). His only reasoning for this is that the way we do it (OK in bottom right corner, Cancel to the left of it) is the opposite of what Microsoft does throughout Windows(Cancel in bottom right corner, OK to the left of it). That is his one and only reason. He fails to acknowledge that switching it will annoy the hell out of every single person that uses our software (thousands of people). The next time he brings it up I might punch him in the face. :mad:
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
I agree with him. You should always try and follow what the OS does. And since your app's a Windows app, you need to do what Windows does, which is always OK on the left and Cancel to the right. It'll make it way way easier for your users when your app starts behaving like the rest of the OS.
Regards, Nish
Blog: voidnish.wordpress.com Latest article: C++ 11 features in Visual C++ 2013 Preview
-
Quote:
just because something is done one way in a different environment doesn't mean it should be done that way everywhere
It does if I say so! ;P
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
Ha!
Jeremy Falcon
-
Not a bad idea at all: you bind the fishing line to the end of the rifle, and when you get bored you shoot the competition :cool:
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto) Point in case: http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/02/apple_gotofail_lessons[^]
Stefan_Lang wrote:
Not a bad idea at all: you bind the fishing line to the end of the rifle, and when you get bored you shoot the competition
Now if we just toss a boomerang on the end of the line, we'll never have to go get our food again!
Jeremy Falcon