Buttons on the Web: Placement and Order

Let us not forget GoneME: A fork of GNOME that started with the "Buttonorder" patch, a patch to revert the then recently committed change from "OK"/"Cancel" to "Cancel/OK".

> Reverting the Buttonorder is one of the things that I would like to see done and the first approaches into that direction has been started. When the specific MacOSX way of Buttonorder was introduced it so what caused troubles for me and other participants of GNOME that people filled pages with complaints and rants because it irritates them when they use GNOME applications together with KDE, MOTIF, GNOME 1 etc. applications. They are not consistent anymore and that's an argument for me to revert back. All these nice usability studies - good or bad - but changing something a user got used too for many years is not the best decision and then trying to enforce the same on KDE isn't good either. Some of these people are even going that far that they tell everyone that everything else as order is wrong and must be reported as bug. It's totally regardless for them what the opinion of users are, what only matters is that they must be right because they say so.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180902122151/http://www.akcaag...

This is a very complex topic that’s been studied and discussed for decades. Further study and discussion is great, but this article didn’t add much beyond some opinion.

The author misses half the concern of button layout: target acquisition, or “how long, once I’ve found the button I want to use, does it take to tab to it/move my mouse to it/tap it and how likely am I to miss (and potentially hit a different element/button with potentially frustrating or disastrous results)?”

For me personally left buttons are often annoying on mobile as I have a wide phone (like lots of people) which I hold with my right hand (like lots of people) meaning I'd need to stretch or use my other hand to press the button.

Much of what is discussed in this article as something "we should try out" is already a well-researched topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_grouping

Forms on the early web almost always had everything left aligned. There simply wasn't that much formatting to begin with. I know it is gross over-simplification, but it felt like the first half of that article spent a ton of time just telling us to go back to our roots.

I feel like unless you are Microsoft, Google, Apple, or similar, you should opt for whatever is most intuitive to your audience, and that will be whatever convention is predominant in the other products they use. An analysis of the most rational, internally consistent usage is moot. If your customers have been trained by Apple to expect "first right" in horizontal button layouts and "first top" in vertical button layouts, it's irrelevant that this is inconsistent with English reading order of left-to-right and top-down. Unless you have the power to move the entire culture, such considerations shouldn't enter the picture.

The meta-observation here is that before you think about whether you need a dialog, consider whether you can design the system such that it doesn't need one in the first place.

From the images one can make conclusion that positive button is closer to the corner. So when buttons left, positive will be left, when buttons are right positive is also right

The button which generates the most revenue for the web site will be largest, first, and the default.