On 23 May 2008, at 17:46, Matthew Nuzum wrote: > Instead of using the transactional approach employed in MS Windows, > where you hit the save button to save all changes and cancel to undo > all changes, each click of the "undo" button could undo the last > change progressively until you're back to where you were when you > first started messing with things. Of course, for some applications it > might make sense and a single undo step may be appropriate. I don't > think an "undo" button needs to have a "redo" button to compliment it. > "Undo" is your escape route.
See, this is where the argument went round in circles last time :) Some others on the usability team at the time also suggested this approach, but personally I don't think Undo is necessarily appropriate for dialogs-- it's rare to make more than one or two changes in a dialog at a time, in which case it's usually just overkill. And when you do make multiple changes, they're often quite independent of each other, so you don't necessarily want to have to undo your last N changes to undo the first one you made. (Although, sometimes, you might.) Then there's the question of whether a 'Reset to Defaults' button would be useful too... probably 'yes', in some cases, but things would start getting awfully cluttered if you add a Defaults and a Revert/ Undo to every Preferences dialog... Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] GNOME Desktop Team http://blogs.sun.com/calum +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list Usability@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
