What's new in GTK+ 3 dialogs [LWN.net]

What's new in GTK+ 3 dialogs

Posted Jul 31, 2014 12:07 UTC (Thu) by tao (subscriber, #17563)
In reply to: What's new in GTK+ 3 dialogs by mathstuf
Parent article: What's new in GTK+ 3 dialogs

Last time I checked, "cancel" was a verb...

'OK' could be argued to be a verb too ("Can you OK this new specification?"), but it's of course less commonly used as such.
That said, I think most people have a pretty clear understanding what "OK" does when you press it... ("Hmmm, this dialogue gives me two options, OK and Cancel. Cancel reasonably aborts the operation, so I suspect pressing OK will approve performing it").

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What's new in GTK+ 3 dialogs

Posted Jul 31, 2014 12:22 UTC (Thu) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link] (2 responses)

This has been discussed at length in various places - you really want to give some idea of the actual action that will be performed on the button, rather than expecting the user to read the full message (mostly because they won't):

http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/9946/should-i-use-y...

What's new in GTK+ 3 dialogs

Posted Jul 31, 2014 19:39 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

That is a matter of opinion. I really dislike "verbose" dialogs.

For example, I'm editing a document and want to close it without saving. I expect a usual dialog "Do you want to proceed? YES/NO", as it's usual.

However, some extra-smart software (like TextEdit on OS X) decides that I simply _must_ be saving the document and shows me a dialog with a name selector. And pressing "Cancel" returns me to the editor.

Not good.

What's new in GTK+ 3 dialogs

Posted Aug 1, 2014 9:04 UTC (Fri) by BlueLightning (subscriber, #38978) [Link]

The example you give doesn't really have anything to do with the design ideal in question. The program could still have displayed a dialog saying "You have unsaved changes, what do you want to do? [Save] [Discard] [Cancel]" (and indeed many current editors do exactly this).

The problem with "Do you want to proceed? YES/NO" is that some applications used to ask "do you want to proceed?" [with quitting, i.e. don't save] and others asked "do you want to save?" with the same set of yes/no answers. If as a user I'm not paying attention or don't bother to read the message and blindly click, I might make a mistake and lose work. Why leave that hole open for users to fall into, when the solution is simple and need not be intrusive?

What's new in GTK+ 3 dialogs

Posted Jul 31, 2014 13:12 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Oops, yeah. Unfortunately, it is a very non-desript one here and I think should be removed for a clean break. I coukd argue about it on user-triggered actions, but it definitely doesn't belong on dialogs about security warnings or such. I especially hate it on dialogs with a "don't show again" box since that box is ignored in most implementations when that is the choice I want remembered. I'm fine with not having cancel buttons at all and closing the dialog being an acceptable action.

What's new in GTK+ 3 dialogs

Posted Jul 31, 2014 19:33 UTC (Thu) by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492) [Link]

This might be dangerous.

Do you wish to cancel the
operation ?

[OK] [CANCEL]

Um, yeah. What to do, what to do?