unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Martin Albisetti wrote on 09/12/09 20:34:
> 
> On 12/09/2009 04:09 PM, mac_v wrote:
>> 
>> On Wed, 2009-12-09 at 18:37 +0000, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
>...
>>> <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SessionTerminationConfirmation>
>...
>> The mockup is a bit of , the question asked is "Are you sure...."  to
>> which the answer should either be "yes" or "no"
> 
> That's a great observation.

That is what Microsoft advises for Windows software.
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511268.aspx#commitButtons>

But in both Gnome and KDE, alert buttons should never be labelled "Yes"
or "No", because that requires people to read the rest of the text, and
usually they do not, even if you try to make them. (I have observed this
myself, ironically with people who were using Windows.)
<http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/windows-alert.html.en#alert-button-order>
<http://developer.kde.org/documentation/standards/kde/style/dialogs/simple.html#yesno>

Now, the problem you observed is with people who *have* read the text,
but using verbs such as "Cancel" and "Shut Down" satisfies both people
who have and people who haven't. The only people it doesn't satisfy, in
my experience, are developers thinking hard about the grammar.

> Attached are 2 versions, one as a question, and the other more like a
> confirmation. The text, I'm sure, can be tweaked a bit.
> 
> The important bit here is that I moved the countdown to the bottom,
> made it smaller and grayed it out.
>...

In Gnome dialog boxes and alerts, the buttons should always be the
lowest thing in the window, the Cancel button should always be next to
the main action button, and buttons should always use Title Case.

As I said earlier, I think the problem you observed could be fixed
simply by following the standard Gnome alert design, i.e. adding primary
text asking the question. It's tempting to be creative about the design
of this alert (it's about shutting down, therefore it's special), but
being creative here was the problem in the first place.

Cheers
- --
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iEYEARECAAYFAkshAmYACgkQ6PUxNfU6ecqSwgCfUqWTVFeKYvXGCMnOtzzmydOZ
7HIAn0A/y/ZC0VCzWIxeaFpfsqeaaUX0
=HkgC
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----