I've been playing around Adobe Photoshop and various other programs and noticed that quite a few of them place their dialog buttons on the right hand side of a dialog, in a vertical button bar. I was thinking that if done carefully and consistently a developer could accomodate users who prefer that layout by programmatically moving the buttons from a horizontal row at the bottom of the dialog to vertical column on the right hand side.
I have long wondered if user interface designs get flipped around to accomodate the writing direction of the local culture. My suspicion is that this doesn't happen and that there is not much infrastructure in place to make it easy to do this kind of systematic rearraranging. The layout with buttons on the right hand side seems to make better use of the available screen width. Some user interface designs like the gnome-theme-manager and various Find and Replace dialogs seem to end up using this kind of layout, putting buttons in a row on the right hand side rather than at the bottom, without it necessarily being completely intentional. I'm wondering if anyone can think of any justifcations for using this kind of layout and when it might be acceptable. Any thoughts? Sincerely Alan Horkan Inkscape http://inkscape.org Abiword http://www.abisource.com Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/ Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ P.S. Anyone know of an easy to use key logger or click counter, something like to gather data on my own usage patterns? If there was something I could compile into my applications to gather usage data I might be interested to give that a try but in the short term I'm just looking for something simple, a step up from the odometer panel applet. _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
