On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 05:21 -0500, Simon Francis wrote: > Thats stupid, why do I care what button is on a dialog? Escape should > simply dismiss it, its just confusing how it closes some and not > others. Users don't notice that it only does for ones with cancels, it > seems to be random.
Well, one reason to care is that Close and Cancel buttons do the complete opposite of each other (keep my changes vs. discard my changes), and assigning the same keyboard shortcut to opposite actions can, as you might expect, result in user error. (Particularly true in the accessibility case, where the user may not be able to just "glance" at the buttons in the dialog to work out what's going to happen). There's no doubt that it's been a bone of contention, though (and the fact that some apps choose to waive the guideline doesn't help), and there are bugs open about it. Feel free to contribute to the discussions there :) Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Java Desktop System Group http://ie.sun.com +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
