That is pretty much what users are used to. The people who created Windows and Mac certainly understood what they were doing when setting up button orders.
There are two factors to consider: 1. Ease of readability (affirmation directly precedes negation) 2. Precedence of importance (common actions are weighted according to what is expected to be accessed) Because the natural ease of the mouse for most users is to move it to the right, actions are placed by most weight right to left (OK/Cancel - Apply). Because of the natural ease of readability, affirmations precede negations. If we were working in Hebrew, we could probably reconsider things to be Cancel - OK rather than OK - Cancel, but since the entire model was worked with in English, most people are used to OK - Cancel. We can assume that OK/Cancel should be inherently placed in that order because of user readability. Help, Default, OK/Close, Apply Help is least attached to functionality, and is thus generally used less often, making the argument for it to go first. Default has limited attachment to functionality, it acts to set particular values, but always the same. I don't know anything about user 3/2/1, so I'm skipping that. OK/Cancel are linked for readability, and don't act on functionality as much as Apply. Because leaving the window is a more common function than setting defaults (generally you set defaults only once, but you could leave the window under multiple values of settings), OK/Cancel are in their place. Next is apply, which is the essence of displaying new functionality according to the settings, so therefore it's the most important and farthest right. I think I need to sleep now though. I might even catch up to going to bed at night tomorrow. Lennart Borgman wrote: > Jacob Beauregard wrote: >> In my opinion, the logical way to order things is to have them >> weighted by use, most used being the furthest right. There is a >> psychological explanation for that. Also, affirmatives should always >> be directly left of their negative counterparts. >> >> Will anyone shoot me for not paying attention to what anyone does, or >> do I actually have merit in what I say? I don't know!!!!!!! > > > What you write sounds reasonable, but the most important to me seems > to follow the guidelines that the users are accustomed to. > _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
