Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok
factorio.com
factorio.com
Ultimately, the answer about this UX style is very much the same as a question about writing style—there's no objectively right answer, but you have to be consistent.
For example, you can pick up any number of style books from Strunk & White to the Chicago Manual of Style and get different "right" answers about writing style, but any editor will tell you the ultimate solution is to be internally consistent.
The arguments for each approach have merit. "OK on the left" designers will argue that because we read from left to right, the positive response should be first. "OK on the right" designers will say that the positive response carries the user forward, and because we read from left to right, forward progress should be on the right.
My personal feeling is that there's another argument for OK on the right, which is that the majority of users are right-handed, so the default choice will be closer to their dominant hand if it's placed on the right.
Then again, I may be looking for evidence to support my preference, which probably arose from the fact that I began designing on the Mac, so I was conditioned to Apple's "OK on the right" standard at an early age, and I've simply conflated "familiar" with "correct."
So the answer from this veteran UX designer would be: Use whichever placement your users are going to be the most familiar with, but whichever you choose, be 100% consistent with the choice you make.
I think this is the right answer. Personally and anecdotally, I doubt it makes a noticeable difference which way they are, as long as they are that way everywhere. I will soon learn that "confirm/apply/proceed" is one way, and "back/cancel/revert" is the other way, whichever way those tend to be. Just make sure you don't flip on me.
When a timer finishes, you get a large button at the top for Stop, and a smaller one at the bottom for Repeat. When an alarm goes off, the Stop button is the small one at the bottom, and the larger top button says Snooze. Very often I find myself repeating a timer instead of stopping it.
iPhone alarm control became so wrong that I stopped using the screen and snooze only via top physical button. I’m not sure, but feels like it wasn’t like that before some idiot decided to change the way alarm works for sleepy subconsciously-trained users. Curious how many $M net cost was put into this “design”.
(Googled it: there was no stop button in ios 5, only slide-to-stop, which you cannot do accidentally)
Like GP said:
> [...] which probably arose from the fact that I began designing on the Mac, so I was conditioned to Apple's "OK on the right" standard at an early age [...]
Your users most likely will have been conditioned, too. So, don't force them to adopt a different button layout just because "you decided otherwise". If you're developing for multiple platform, it might well be worth your time to ajust those options depending on the platform the application is running on (just like it's almost always better to use a native save/load dialog for files).
And, if you're arriving at that point, you might even consider including a configuration option for those poor souls who have to use the application on another platform at work than they do privately.
Not only that, but make the "OK" choice standout with a different color. If the "default" option is brighter than the rest, your eyes will most likely gravitate towards it first, regardless of the order of the buttons.
It's a terrible web app.
I'm entirely convinced that banking website design guidelines are driven entirely by a seething hatred for the end-user.
I've thought about this and (in all seriousness) I think the reason is that the tech banking sector must be plagued with ancient programmers that don't give a damn about UI and design.
Also when constrained by geography I subconsciously have been seeking out new areas with enough space to resume building left to right like a printer executing a carriage return rather than zig zagging backwards (which perhaps could be more efficient).
Since I’ve noticed that factorio mimics a lot of patterns from the real world I wonder if this prevalent in some other areas eg integrated circuit or circuit board layouts.
Edit: context
Related to your comment, even if unrelated to the theme as a whole: “Snowpiercer - Left or Right”[1]. A video essay by Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos. Unfortunately they’ve stopped that series[2]; it was easily one of my favourite things on the internet. Off the top of my head I’ll recommend “Jackie Chan - How to Do Action Comedy”[3], “Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy”[4], and “Memories of Murder (2003) - Ensemble Staging”[5].
[1]: https://vimeo.com/110329961
[2]: https://vimeo.com/tonyzhou
[3]: https://vimeo.com/113439313
On the other hand -- it's set in an evil castle, with dark muddy colors and a minor-key soundtrack. So maybe the right-to-left motion is intended to make the player feel uncomfortable.
What are your thoughts on how smartphones might impact this left vs. right debate? The button on the right is accessible without using just one hand (tapping with thumb while holding in palm), but I need two hands to tap the button on the left.
But I'm left-handed. Do right-handed people hold their smartphone in their left hand? It just occurred to me that my minority handedness might be why I've always found large smartphones hard to use.
It will be interesting to see what conventions from Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointer (WIMP) interfaces still exist on mobile in ten years, when desktop UIs are mostly history.
We still type on QWERTY keyboards, even though the original rationale is long gone; musicians still make albums about an hour long even though they don't have to fit on two sides of a vinyl record anymore; we still have 60 minutes in an hour even though the ancient Babylonians' base 60 counting system has been gone for millennia.
I wonder how many more generations will continue to debate whether "cancel" should go on the left or the right?
When early cellphones came along I had no trouble using my left hand only when most "right-ies" I know used them with the right hand. Since smartphones became popular I still phone with my left hand primarily, though I have become more ambidextrous with it, and I've noticed that others seem to switch hands more too.
I look at it using a more logically safe approach where the first option should be cancel/back/safe_option to force people to think before clicking through.
His reasoning was that most people's eyes move left to right when examining something - which mimics their eye movement when reading text (at least in Western societies. In R-L countries I guess the opposite would be true).
He said that by position the nose/cockpit of the aircraft on the left side, people's eyes would always go to where the 'little humans' would sit first, then move away towards the right. Similarly if you had scale model humans in a diorama setting - place them on the left hand side.
Placing the vehicles going against their eye movement would also make their attention 'catch' and stop at details of the object 'moving' in the opposite way (something about how people who drive cars are just more instinctually aware of something that is moving against their direction of travel). Whereas if they had to scan in the same direction the vehicle was moving, their attention would just slip past interesting points.
I've used those lessons in most of my UX design nowadays. Placing buttons and important items towards the right of a page, with lesser items further right. The only exception is if it is a destructive action call (deleting a record etc.), then I usually place the button all the way to the right so it isn't in visual way and too tempting.
I'd follow the reading-direction paradigm for something like a UI or arranging books on a shelf, but not for art.
Back in 2010, a Youtuber named Derek Lieu created a supercut called "Every Anime Opening Ever Made" [0]. One of the notes:
> Interesting thing I learned, if a character is running it's overwhelmingly to the left of the screen.
(Watching the video, "running" may as well also include "standing" and "flying")
Characters moving is a bit different than a diorama, but there may be something to it. I think I remember something similar someone else had found about western animation, that it's biased towards having characters move to the right rather than the left.
So how would this work in Ancient Greece where they wrote boustrophedon (alternately left to right and right to left)?
And how does it work for illiterate people or peoples without a written language?
Maybe putting his airplanes facing left made your veteran's models pop because they were inconsistent with other models.
Anyway, if you want to make people read the options on buttons, randomize the order each time the popup appears but always destructive buttons like "delete" red colours.
Whilst I initially thought it was cool, it quickly wore me out. Often times, if I was in the 'flow' of editing, that tiny fraction of time that it took me to stop and have to actually read the screen (instead of habitually clicking on a position without even reading) was enough to interrupt my thought processes and impact my productivity.
I think it would be like randomly rearranging the clutch/brake/throttle pedals on a manual car every day. Sometimes you just want your tools to stay out of the way and not interrupt you when you are busy. It is far better to have your feet (oh, ok - mouse cursor) fall to the right places without having to think too much, especially if your mind is busy on more important stuff happening.
I think one of these may have been meant to say left!
Another thing to note in the Factorio mockups is the use of a guideline that I originally picked up from the macOS HIG[1]: use descriptive verbs rather than a generic confirmation.
"Apply settings" vs "OK"
"Load game" vs "OK"
"Delete file" vs "OK"
"Send email" vs "OK"
"Print" vs "OK"
and so on.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
People don't read the message in the popup. But when presented with a Delete button users start to think about what they are doing.
Also: 'Delete - Cancel' sets 'Cancel' in a much better context. You are going to cancel a delete action not an 'Ok' action.
Instead, the UI should be seen to do the operation, but then delay its execution while showing an "undo" for a few seconds.
The reason for this is that 99.9% of people know what they're doing. So don't bother them for the sake of the 0.1% who make a mistake.
But more importantly - for each dialogue (of whatever kind) you have in an application, the chances of the user reading it declines by the square of the number of dialogues they encounter in a given session to the point where they will never be read, ever.
rm () {
(sleep 30 && \rm "$@") &
}
Pretty sure there are a plethora of options for each OS but here’s a couple:
For OSX, homebrew has a handy “trash” command line tool [1].
For Ubuntu, trash-cli seems popular [2].
1. `brew install trash`
2. http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/trash-put.1...
Is it still going to be out of scope if he e.g. runs the shell script from the shell?
That is a worse user experience by far - you should never tell someone something has been done unless you are sure it has been done permanently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(computer_interface)#Asse...
In your example, you could use a dialog during the first delete with a toggle option in the delete confirmation dialogue of "don't show this next time."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(computer_interface)#Asse...
The issue is that novice, elderly, power or otherwise, if you have dialogues popping up all the time asking you if you're sure, and 99% of the time you ARE sure, then pretty soon you will habituate to just hitting OK whatever until the one time you DON'T mean OK, at which point you have an undo.
This isn't controversial, or just my opinion, it's observed, researched HCI stuff (mainly in the context of aircraft cockpit design but also on desktop software and the web).
> 99.9% of people know what they're doing
You have very different users than those of anything I've ever written then. :)
Well, and it is also much easier to quickly locate and hit an Undo-button on a small touch screen than it is with a mouse on a giant screen.
But yeah, I definitely also see a lot more confirm-dialogs still.
Seems to be a classic case of such a UI pattern being great and hyper modern and marketable in 99% of cases. But if in 1% of cases, the user accidentally deletes a file that they didn't want to delete, then you lose that user in that exact moment.
That is, if you are not a preinstalled app. If instead you are Google, then users are generally not aware of alternatives and cannot switch away from your app, if this happens to them. They just live with your UI eating their files.
Not to mention that it was quite clearly their fault for not finding the Undo-button quick enough. Which is also generally an opinion that users manage to hold, who have not yet progressed to looking at alternatives of programs and comparing different UIs for their merits.
Perfect example of a UX pattern that's simply asking for trouble, or being clever rather than helpful. :)
You can undo if you notice quickly enough, if your dog, child, doorbell or 1,001 other things didn't distract you at the wrong moment and if you didn't get an incoming call in the temporary undo window. No, we won't tell you how long you can undo for, even though times can vary. Don't be old (or even middle-aged needing reading glasses), or slow.
Seems very much against long known recommendations from Nielsen et al for consistency of expectation etc.
A quick skim through search seems to indicate it came with Material Design. I suspect had it generally caught on it my switch to iOS would have come even sooner. :D
Relevant to delete / undo they talk of the preference for an undo (eg ^Z at any time) to "Are you sure?". No mention of delaying action or availability of undo. Then preference for consistency of action - within app and generally, not deviating from common expectations (eg that a trash can allows restore), and recommendations for visual feedback when latency and delay is involved. None of which fits the original temporary delay/undo.
In both of those links I posted, it clearly states well-designed systems have undo.
I've always looked at interface choices like this: As a non-Chinese reader, if I see a dialog in Chinese and the "Yes/Confirm" and No/Back" buttons are the same size, shape, and color, I will have no clue which does what. However, if the "Yes" option is a darker shade, or has bolder text, or the button shape makes it scream "click me!", I'll feel relatively confident that this is the button I need to press to proceed with whatever I'm trying to do.
And then there is the new UI paradigm, seen on many web apps, where "positive response" is replaced with "whatever response would be the best outcome for the company".
When we start using a UI we certainly read every button before clicking on one, but after a while we just want to find the correct button. And in that case it might be helpful to place the button for the primary action right next to the bottom right corner, as that corner is one of the places we start looking for the button. With the OK-Cancel order, the OK-button would be hidden behind the Cancel-button.
Nevertheless, this factor doesn't change anything about your conclusion. I think your argument is very balanced and I agree with your conclusion about consistency being the most important factor.
To add to this, if we're doing a task, it's probably safe to assume we're more interested in going on with it, so there's a reason for the affirmative button being at the left of the group (first to be parsed). Also, you typically ask "Yes or no?", not "No or yes?". Just a maybe different perspective from a Windows user.
Companies make these 'slightly different' approaches often and probably usually to avoid design patent issues.
Microsoft also put the toolbar with the menu for getting to your programs a the bottom with the 'Start' menu, this really should have been at the top. Apple had their menu at the top so Microsoft did it differently. In those days I found it absurd how you had menus flowing out from the bottom left of the screen. Moving the menu to the top was drag and drop but nobody bothered, therefore having it wasn't that big a deal.
Microsoft had to work with IBM on the original Windows so they got a lot of things right including the universal shortcut keys for menu actions. You were never left requiring a mouse except for in MS Paint.
Surely the file dialog boxes and whatnot were designed to 'not look different' but tied in to this universal hotkey thing they had going, i.e. some sensible rule so you could tab or arrow key away from the 'OK' button?
That just makes my own things consistent with each other. I thought the problem was to decide what _everyone_ should use.
External consistence isn't subjective. It's as objective to that system as any other fact, and is a matter of understanding, not feeling or choosing or designing.
If you're building an extension to MS Office, make your app comply with MS Office. Same with Adobe Photoshop plugins. And ultimately same with apps/programs for an OS.
If the OS does OK-left, do OK-left.
The UI that does not exist is the UI that is performing the best.
No one "uses" a UI. They just pass it. If you're thinking too hard about it, chances are you'll make your users think about it also. And trying to get noticed will always be at the expense of usability.
And finally, metrics such as consistency, obviousness/coherence, and simplicity are also objectively measurable, as are error rates, A/B tests, and step counts. What is subjective is user feedback and even developer feedback. By tallying what people think of an interface, you've already abandoned the goal of remaining unnoticed, and this is how Frankenstein UIs are built.
OK and cancel don't consider this aspect as much, but IMO OK should require more conscious movement to accomplish. I'd rather accidentally cancel sending an email than accidentally prematurely send one for example.
https://www.factorio.com/blog/
Also, if you're reading this, you are in a demographic that is likely to absolutely love Factorio. Go buy it, it's 20 eur/usd, you won't regret it.
Some call it "Programming: The Game".
(Edit: I’m joking. It’s a great game.)
7pm: I think to myself, let's do some work on my side project... but first, lets play a little factorio
3am: FU#! :/
It's a joke, but like all the best jokes it's one with a large grain of truth and exactly why I've held off buying Factorio for now (Frostpunk as well).
This is actually why I haven't bought it (yet). When I have the urge to program something, I think I'd rather put that towards building something real than playing Factorio.
Factorio for me is too much like work, except I think it's a fine game, I just already often spend my day making systems to put things on queues and take them off queues, trying to keep the queues from getting full or empty...
Since I get paid hourly for my normal work .... I started wondering, "Wait, why am I not just working right now? Same thing except I get paid......"
It should be called something like "Jenkins: The Game".
I actually had a similar experience with Space Chem. It was fun until I realized I was playing "Procedural Spaghetti Code: The Game."
I wish there was a "Functional Programming: The Game"
Sure, once you go megabase scale, after a few hundred hours of playing, most hardware will lag a little. But at that point there are millions of objects the game has to track every loop, there isn't terribly much that can be done about it. The game doesn't aggregate like OpenTTD, where the number of passengers at a train stop is just a number. Because of the way it works, every piece of iron ore in a train station in Factorio is a separate object existing somewhere. (Though they do some tricks to abstract that a bit as well, see their belt compression blog posts.)
Unlike in a lot of games where the computational complexity is all graphics-oriented and done in the GPU, these computations are largely all CPU.
Modern laptops should generally be fine though.
It's still quite performant. Some of the larger factories people have built are truly stunning in scale, yet can run at 30+ updates a second. People can host games with hundreds of players with relative ease.
At the beginning of the game, even quite modest computers will have no trouble with it, but that's not a reflection of what the game is about. Big factories are much of the point.
I've heard it called Cracktorio.
But yes, I have seen a lot of concepts of programming in the game.
The blog is quite good too, and the interactions I've seen with the developers have been excellent. There's a reddit community too: https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio
There's an active modding community as well, and several of the mods are fairly extensive; I'd recommend beating the vanilla game first, though.
For anyone on the fence about buying the game, there is a free demo[1].
Worth it though. Probably the best game I've ever played.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/submit
1 a : to yield to governance or authority
b : to subject to a condition, treatment, or operation * the metal was submitted to analysis
2 : to present or propose to another for review, consideration, or decision; also : to deliver formally * submitted my resignation
3 : to put forward as an opinion or contention * we submit that the charge is not proved
It (the "Submit" button) is "present[ing]" (or "deliver[ing]") the form data field contents to the server. And in fact, myself, until I read your comment, never even considered the word in the context of the "yield" definition due to how it operates.
But it's better to mirror the action verb for your confirmation button, because users don't necessarily read the text you present them with. So, instead of this:
Delete xyz.jpg?
--------------------------
The file 'xyz.jpg' will be
permanently deleted.
--------------------------
[ OK ] [ Cancel ]
Delete xyz.jpg?
--------------------------
The file 'xyz.jpg' will be
permanently deleted.
--------------------------
[ Delete ] [ Cancel ]
There's very good, detailed guidance on this in the Windows design guidelines (the design-specific aspects are a bit dated since everything there refers to Vista/7-era UI elements, but their guidance on text and dialog styles is still applicable):
Text: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn7...
Dialog Boxes: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn7...
"Cancel this action?" "Yes" "Cancel"
Seriously?!
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/05/24/171215/windows-10-u...
> In a move guaranteed to annoy many people, Microsoft has "jumped the shark" on encouraging users to upgrade to Windows 10. Microsoft has faced criticism for changing the pop-up box encouraging Windows users to upgrade to Windows 10. Clicking the red cross on the right hand corner of the pop-up box now activates the upgrade instead of closing the box.
On reconnecting the power cable we find all files deleted anyway.
On the other hand, I think Yes or No are clearly an answer to "Cancel this action?"
Or you can just bend the UX rules for this one instance.
Or you can consider whether cancel is the best verb anyway; what about “end” or “stop” or “abort”?
The file 'xyz.jpg' will be
permanently deleted.
--------------------------
Delete xyz.jpg?
--------------------------
[ Yes ] [ No ]
To a certain extent, I would think this is the point of using this approach (at least for a "delete" action). I'd prefer the user to stop and think, "wait, what is this?" instead of just blindly clicking through.
And more generally, before disregarding industry best practices and findings from research literature and implementing something based on ad-hoc personal hunches, make sure you run some experiments on real people.
That's the cop-out answer I get whenever I ask about unnecessary and infuriating UI changes. It has only given rise to increasingly dumbed-down, stupifying interfaces.
I am recommending that instead of just making something up based on the developer’s speculation and personal preference (which in your particular example happens to be terrible, as you would discover if you actually tested it in a real-world setting), it is a better idea as a general rule to go read actual user studies about what works and why, or if you are too lazy to do that go find some interface guidelines written by someone who did large-scale user studies and spent decades honing their interfaces in response to user feedback and copy it.
If you insist on rejecting those findings and past experience with a novel implementation, then I am recommending running your own mini studies (ideally something semi-formal, but at least test the two versions on a couple buddies at a coffee shop), to make sure you don’t shoot your foot off. To do anything less is in my opinion lazy and irresponsible.
Why do you think that will lead to “stupefying interfaces”?
You think that doing at least a tiny bit of user research before blindly rushing ahead based on personal preferences renders people unable to think or feel?
Or maybe you have a non-standard definition of “stupefy”? To be honest I don’t understand what you are trying to say.
My points all come from real-world experience, both as a user and developer. These unwanted UI changes irritate me enough to complain about them, but apparently my opinion doesn't count at all, because these so-called "experts" will only parrot their vague "studies show that X, therefore you are wrong"? These "user studies" naturally bias towards the worst of the worst. In fact, you are displaying exactly the sort of dismissive holier-than-thou attitude that I've been on the receiving end of, multiple times, and I can personally tell you that it really fucking pisses me off.
Think about it: if I'm the user of your software, and you change it so that it breaks my workflow, I am not going to be happy regardless of whatever justification you provide.
Having been on the receiving end of that, I've learned not to do it to my users, because I know how it feels.
You said “In fact, I'd say this is even clearer, putting the question at the end and immediately following it with the two choices:”
Did you ever test this explicitly vs. the recommended alternative of using verbs for labels? (Ideally by doing a user study, but heck, I’ll take anything...)
I claim that this has been empirically tested and found to be inferior (i.e. result in higher error rate) in a variety of studies, both in published research and internal to various large companies which then got baked into their design guidelines. This was a subject of active research in the 1970s–1990s (and perhaps before).
You can find reasonably good advice about the subject in any number of introductory interface design textbooks, etc.
In this particular case, where user data is being irrevocably deleted, errors are especially harmful.
Edit: Maybe the word “terrible” in my previous comment was unfair. Sorry to be inflammatory.
If the action is to move forward with something or not, I think I prefer the "next"-type button to be on the right, and "cancel" or "back" on the left, probably far left.
But, my thinking does violate the "pick one and be consistent" suggestion. So... I dunno :)
And we don’t always react to confirmations instantly. What if you’re distracted away, or you suddenly second guess your decision and perform some auxiliary research? Or what if you have more than one dialogue box on the screen at a time? From a UX standpoint, it is far safer to repeat the verb rather than use a generic.
To be frank, the only reason why I could imagine using generics is laziness.
Unsaved changes will be lost. Save your changes first?
Unsaved changes will be lost. Are you sure?
If the user is exposed to one convention 90% of the time, the other one will always cause some confusion and feel sloppy.
Delete xyz.jpg?
--------------------------
The file 'xyz.jpg' will be
permanently deleted.
--------------------------
[ Delete xyz.jpg ]
[ Keep xyz.jpg ]
My gut feeling is that when written as a verb, it should always be the longer form, ex: "I will okay it, like I okayed the last one."
I believe it's from the same writing-sense that intuits "I have three main points" as superior to "I have 3 main points."
According to who? Why? I've never heard this before and it doesn't sound like a remotely necessary rule.
e.g. Cancel cancelling / proceed to cancel. To me, that always seemed like a place where a simple "Yes/No" would be more appropriate.
Clear as mud, right?
I bought a couple of bags of just two keys. Red panic buttons "Panic", and, "Any" keys.
We replaced the escape key cap with those when we sold new systems.
The "Any" key was a big hit and quite popular with the n00bs back in those AT (286) days.
I think I may still have a few of those around lolz.
Or if you are half way through paying for your cart, the merchant should check you really meant to press cancel.
Windows managed to do this as backwardly as possible (no pun intended). Switching their button order vs. the Mac might not have mattered if Windows put the first button in the bottom left corner for predictability. Instead, they right-justified an entire group of left-ordered buttons so you have no way of knowing if the corner button will be the main action. Then they tended to use nondescript button titles, made worse by APIs that make it easier to pop up yes/no questions than Action1/Action2 (i.e. custom titles) so apps lazily trend toward nondescript. And then the OS had relatively tiny fonts without formatting that made it hard to understand at a glance what a message is even asking, requiring careful reading to proceed.
A good UI is not a very simple thing, there are lots of details to be considered.
When a “Cancel OK” dialog appears, “OK” is the default choice (in blue) but Cancel is the highlighted one[1], presumably because it’s the first option. This is incredibly convenient because ↵ will activate “OK”, while pressing the space bar will activate “Cancel”. One gets used fast to pressing a single key to act on a dialog, instead of having to tab through controls.
It's System Preferences → Keyboard → Shortcuts → All controls on my Mac (10.13.5)
Wrong.
One of the things i love about windows is that it's always been designed for keyboard only use, not just bolted on as an afterthought. Every dialog, widget, application and feature can be used with only the keyboard and it's fast, easy and predictable how to. Unfortunately since windows 8 there's been some regressions in this area with the new metro interface. Defaulting the underlined hotkey to off (since windows xp), was also a big mistake imo.
It's an incredibly useful behaviour.
I can't tell you how many times I've had my cursor ready to type a method name, realized I didn't recall the precise wording of the method or the order or type of its arguments, and paged my way up to where the method was defined in the same file...then not had to labouriously search my way back to where I was and click in the right spot to type, but just start typing as soon as I had the information. Bam, it types it in the right spot and jumps the view back to it for me.
I don’t think that’s deserving of “wow”. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. It’s a clear option that is quite visible and present in the exact preference pane you’d expect. And you don’t need to activate it manually. You can do it via CLI:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleKeyboardUIMode -int 3
I haven’t used Windows in years so I can’t compare, but keyboard support on macOS doesn’t feel like an afterthought to me. Without leaving the same screen where one activates keyboard support for all controls, one can also change and set keyboard shortcuts for every other action including every menu option of every app. And if doing it manually isn’t your thing, you can also define those keyboard shortcuts via CLI. It even works for setting single key (no modifier) shortcuts.
When you make a mistake that prompts a dialog box, having to move your cursor to undo can feel slightly punishing. Doing it with a single key press makes it feel like part of the process.
Years ago, we had a critical for a “company saving trade show demo” setup on an early version of Windows NT. There was a server fault and when we brought it back up there was a glitch. No matter what we did the system kept presenting us with a modal warning that proceeding would probably destroy the data on the hard drive. The choices where Ok and Continue. After several calls to MS we finally called our partners and GE was able to back channel us to the developer who wrote the modal who told us “Continue” was the safe option. At least he admitted it wasn’t the best way of presenting “do it” or “skip this step” options.
Personally, I’m firmly in the Cancel —- “verb the thing” camp these days.
Get rid of all these buttons, but provide a mechanism to UNDO the change. Linear undo plus the option to reinstate "factory default" settings is probably optimal for most applications.
Would you tolerate a text editor that asked you to confirm each letter you typed?
2. Cancel is not just for “are you sure”. It’s often there for “never mind, let me go back”, as in the file open dialog example.
Where I have issues with that is it usually feels like an afterthought rather than a first-class feature.
If you instead model your application after an event log then your current state is just a fold over these events. You have the same list of actions you previously had to manage undo, but now its positioned at the very center of the architecture.
And then you start seeing emergent features of that design:
- you can time travel the UI's state, which is probably the best debugging tool you can have for UIs.
- you can replay the event log over fixed application code, which greatly decrease iteration times.
- it moves logic outside of the UI components, making the app easier to unit test.
- you're storing a sequence of intents rather than results; its effectively free to audit such a design, its convenient to report the last X actions performed with a bug report and more precise than asking the user what they were doing.
The list goes on and on. I believe most of the complexity in applications is generated from the fact there is very little synergy between the different features of these applications. If everything requires a different abstraction and set of indirections, then you're just accreting complexity over time.
If you have a design where features can emerge from it, its usually a safe-bet to say you're on to something :)
I feel like you mostly missed the OP's point.
They say:
”In general, dialog boxes should be laid out with the most important information and controls at the top left, working down to the less important information, ending with the default button—the button most likely to be clicked—at the lower right”
So, there’s “in general”, and “most likely to be clicked”.
The first leaves wiggle room, and the latter opens the door for changing the order. They even almost give an example: an alert “Are you sure you want to erase all changes to your document?” with buttons “Erase” and “Don’t Erase”, in that order, with “Don’t Erase” being the default button.
I don’t remember ever seeing a dialog on a Mac in those years that had OK—Cancel, though (there were a few in the 90’s from bad ports)
I think this was WinZip, but am not certain.
Here's an example from Total Commander: https://www.dedoimedo.com/images/computers_new_2/windows-coo...
(the number to press changes randomly between launches)
I'd call it 'user hostile'.
Opening parts of the application that I don't intend to open in an attempt to force me to look at them is disorienting, distracting from work, and gives rise to emotions that I do not wish to experience.
As far as your conclusions about this not being user hostile, or a gray or dark pattern, I disagree. We must be operating from different definitions of user hostility. I don't wish to participate in psychological warfare and regarding my use of a program. If they wish to cut off or restrict usage of it, they should simply do so.
As far as things like timers or other shareware style restrictions, they seems legitimate to me, though obsolete. It strikes me as a different topic.
But...with client-side-decorations, these dialog buttons are often present instead of the window buttons (i.e. close/minimise/maximise). But the window buttons are on the right!
So you want to close a normal window with window buttons? Top right. You want to cancel a dialog box that uses CSD? Top left.
This confuses my muscle memory to no end, as I have to check if a window is a dialog box or not before I can move my mouse to close it. And it's not like they'll eventually make every window a dialog box - accidentally opening gnome-terminal will always be a normal window to be closed with the close button and not a dialog button.
I think the best solution is to switch the Window buttons to the left like Ubuntu used to do.
If you start a completely new game, the default name for a save game is the previous game you were playing. This means that you can very easily overwrite hundreds of hours of gametime by dabbling in multiplayer or a test map.
I reported this but it got closed by some jerk moderator as "working as intended" - looks like it got forgotten: https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=46646
It's still the behavior in the game.
[0] http://uxmovement.com/buttons/why-ok-buttons-in-dialog-boxes...
What do you think, no or yes?
So I go with Cancel-Ok, but holding this conviction very loosely.
My philosophy used to be to follow the native platform convention, so on Mac it's Cancel-OK, on Windows or Linux it's OK-Cancel. Seems simple, do what people are used to.
But what about a web app that someone uses on Mac at work and Windows at home, or vice versa? Do they expect the app to work the same wherever they use it, or do they expect it to follow the different native platform conventions?
My mind is spinning.
KDE yes, but GNOME and most GTK+ desktops and apps are definitely Cancel/OK.
Google used to be pretty mixed, but Android and the Material re-designed stuffs seems to be pretty much Cancel/OK too.
I think GNOME started intentionally copying MacOS starting with the GTK+ 2 days.
Out of curiosity, I just installed Blender, which uses its own custom toolkit. The only dialogs I could find were open and save, and it has the open/save actions on top and cancel below. (That's actually what unstyled(?) Qt apps' open/save dialogs do too, as I've just seen in KeepassXC installed as a Snap.) That's one way to not take sides here ;-)
About the vertical orientation, actually i've noticed that not only in Blender but in other programs and toolkits too. In the latter toolkits, it most likely comes from Win9x/2K/XP which used this vertical layout (i think Vista rearranged the buttons to be horizontal).
Did anybody else pick this up? The person has only ever seen Windows. That’s extremely limiting.
A later comment talks about how Microsoft designed things... one of the big differences between Mac and (DOS and early Windows) was that Mac developers tended to use the Apple tool kit and design guidelines, but the other platform devs tended to inventvtheir own and go their own way — being deliberately different.
I taught computing in the early 1990s around the transition from DOS to Windows 3.1 and on a Mac if you learned to print in one app you had it right for all others. With DOS each app was a completely different set of key presses (looking at WordPerfect and Lotus 123). Windows standardised this but it took a while for devs to catch on that consistency with other apps is good practice
My apps are in Qt, and the dialog boxes are idiomatic on all platforms without me having to know or check.
The original Factorio team ( once they grew to 3 ) developed 100% on Windows, Mac, and Linux respectively. So Twinsen may have very little experience outside of windows, that probably helps him develop an authentic Windows experience, while the Mac and Linux developers do the same, and the result is a great cross platform game.
Disclaimer: My in-game hours for Factorio probably qualify me for Stockholm syndrome, so lots of bias here.
I think this is a really thoughtful way to deal with the problem of x-platform UI that isn't using system chrome/dialogues. Don't get in the user's way, and let them develop muscle memory specific for the game.
The other advice on the linked NN post is sensible too: "If you're designing a desktop application for one of these two personal computer platforms, your choice is easy: Do what the platform owner tells you to do."
Not conforming to your environment's native design language is trouble. A miniscule part of the audience are playing the game on both kinds of platforms; the vat majority toggle between Factorio and their home OS.
Often I select a word intending to search it, hit print instead and then hit the wrong button trying to cancel it. This is why I have pieces of paper with one word printed on them.
"We plan that almost every widget in this GUI (and the of the game) will have tooltips briefly explaining what everything does, since for example not even us developers know what Enemy base Richness actually does any more."
Such an honest statement with absolutely no followup. Love it.
In particular, you could give components a tag attribute, and it'd do platform-specific component reordering based on the tags. It was pretty sweet!
I actually kind of like the solution they found, but I'd still argue that this way of reasoning really is a bad idea.
If you remember your Kant - always act so that everyone could do what you do - this would be horrible.
UI is all about consistecy and while it's nice they don't want to interfere with the consistency of the rest of the UI, if every designer would use that excuse, we wouldn't have any consistency at all.
The lyft app when you want to cancel a ride has a "cancel" button that cancels the ride instead of cancelling the cancel.
Accidentally cancelled a ride one time in the middle of it when I fat fingered the first button and then stabbed at "cancel" thinking it meant "abort" and not "ok, continue"...
user taps "cancel" dialogue asks "Are you sure" and presents options: "cancel" and... "cancel"??
What should the options/dialogue be?
Or you use the default back button of your OS (top left in ios/windows or hardkey on android) and only provide the "cancel ride" button to move forward.
BTW, Cancel-OK dates from both of OS X's parents: MacOS and NeXTSTEP.
Linux programs are especially bad in this. You never know what you'll get.
My justification for this is to avoid accidentally going for Ok when what you want is Cancel...but this happens to be biased against left-handed people!
Cancel then OK makes sense as 'OK' is then in the bottom right corner, same place as the 'next' in a wizard GUI. But call it 'Continue' or something, whatever you're saying OK to.
Of course, once they get used to that, it still becomes automatic
and never color an “ok” or “go” or any action other than cancel red. not even if your app’s color scheme is red.
and don’t use both red and green.
then just be consistent.
For example, if you have a dialog that lets you delete something or cancel, the "delete" button should be the red one (although delete/undo is a much better flow than delete/cancel: https://alistapart.com/article/neveruseawarning)
Speaking of which... Android messed this up royally where they just changed their minds and changed all dialogs to the other way with (if I remember correctly, which I probably am not) Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Drove me insane trying to relearn muscle memory to ok/cancel.
Maybe they have documented their reasons for it? (couldn't find it)
Some of the reasons behind the suggestions (which are clearer when you view the associated pictures in the pdf):
"The Western reader’s eye tends to move from the upper-left corner of the dialog box to the lower right. Put the initial impression that you want to convey in the upper-left area (like the alert icon), and place the buttons that a user clicks in the lower right. Following this guideline makes it easier for users to identify what’s important in a dialog box."
"The button names in the save changes alert box correlate to the action users perform by pressing the button. The buttons read Save, Don’t Save, and Cancel. Using these verbs reinforces the identity of each possible action to the user. In other words, the Don’t Save label provides much more context for the user than the word No does."
"In order to prevent accidental clicks of the wrong button, you should always keep safe buttons apart from buttons that could cause data loss. Standardizing the location of buttons in a safe configuration provides an additional safeguard for the user. Place the Save button in the lower-right corner with the Cancel button to its left. Place the Don’t Save button left-aligned with the message text. Make the Save button the default button, which means that it should be linked to the Return or Enter key. This way, the user is less likely to accidentally click the Don’t Save button or activate it with a keystroke and cause irretrievable loss of data."
"Whenever possible, name a button with a verb that describes the action that it performs. Button names should be limited to one word whenever possible. You should never use more than three words for a button name."
One good justification for the Cancel->OK order is that it means the default button (usually the OK button, but also Save, Print etc) is always in the same position in the dialog -- far bottom right -- regardless of how many other buttons there are, and how wide they are. This gives consistency / familiarity / muscle memory.
It also lets you place "data loss" buttons well away, in the far bottom left, as "an additional safeguard for the user". On classic Mac OS, you always knew pressing a button towards the lower left corner, and set away from the other buttons, could spell trouble.
The problem with the Windows way of doing things is that the default button moves depending on the width and number of other buttons, and there is no "safe button place" and "unsafe button place".
In latin and germanic languages, left means back, cancel, undo, bad whereas right means continue, progress, right!
The standard Android button placement later changed to have the back button on the left, but Samsung kept the old order, probably so that users who upgrade their phone within the Samsung Galaxy series don't have to relearn their muscle memory.
Actually on Linux it depends on the toolkit and/or environment you are using and in this case it seems that GNOME/GTK is the odd one out. After doing some search, it looks like that every other toolkit and environment uses OK -> Cancel:
http://ocsmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/plasma-krunner-... (KDE)
https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kdeaccessibility/kmouth/kmout... (KDE)
https://api.kde.org/4.x-api/kdelibs-apidocs/kdeui/html/kdial... (KDE)
https://www.sao.ru/hq/sts/linux/book/xbook_marshall/prompt.g... (Motif)
https://www.sao.ru/hq/sts/linux/book/xbook_marshall/dialog1.... (Motif)
http://northstar-www.dartmouth.edu/doc/idl/html_6.2/images/m... (Motif)
http://www.antillia.com/oz++/images/IconBar.png (Motif)
https://tkdocs.com/images/idleprefs_l.png (Tk)
http://zetcode.com/img/gui/tkinter/colorchooser.png (Tk)
http://www.fltk.org/doc-2.0/html/filechooser.gif (Fltk)
Even on TUIs/Console the order tends to be OK -> Cancel:
http://linuxcommand.org/images/adventure_dialog-radiolist.pn... (dialog)
https://i.imgur.com/ruW7AQE.png (Free Vision)
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pfalcon/picotui/master/pic... (picotui)
Also FWIW in my own programs i am always going OK -> Cancel since it feels more natural.
[1] http://www.geocities.ws/mowasel/tech_zone/images/dialog5.jpg
Better:
> Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok: [added value of article]
E.g.: "A/B tested", or "a historical review", etc.
There are some exceptions to the rule of using the original title. They are listed in the guidelines:
I think both ways are correct, and independent of what we chose, the most important is the application keep coherence and cohesion with itself and (when it is possible) with it's enviroment.
Ok-0k
Cancel-Cancel