Application design semantics(?)

Community Forums/General Help/Application design semantics(?)

matibee

(Posted 2012) [#1]

Can anyone point me to some guidelines I can follow for my new application?

I've found there's a lot of inconsistencies with things like exiting from an unsaved state; some ask if you'd like to save before exiting ([yes][no][cancel]) and others ask if you're sure you want to exit. Obviously clicking [yes] has two very different results and if you're used to working to expectations you stop reading the dialog and just click.

Surely by now there are some guidelines for doing things the right way but I'm not sure what to be googling.

Thanks,

Yasha

(Posted 2012) [#2]

This sort of thing very much depends what environment you're writing for, and even on nested application ecosystems within said environment. Windows? Mac OS X? GNOME? iOS? The rules, such as they are, are all different.

Also, with the exception of closed systems like iOS ...no, there aren't really any guidelines beyond imitating the choices of whoever designed the system itself. For all the decades of and millions of dollars spent on research, about the best anyone has so far is "this is pretty" and "users never read anything in a message box".

My own suggestion would be to never use yes/no options at all: go for "Save" and "Don't Save" or something like that. Make "Cancel" the default choice.

matibee

(Posted 2012) [#3]

Most helpful Yasha, thank you.

I thought they would be.

My own suggestion would be to never use yes/no options at all: go for "Save" and "Don't Save" or something like that. Make "Cancel" the default choice.

Now you mention it that's what I should have been doing from the off. I was just being lazy with the dialogs and hoped to get away with using the default Notify and Confirm dialogs.

Thanks again.

xlsior

(Posted 2012) [#4]

Make "Cancel" the default choice.

Regardless of how you phrase it, the option that won't cause you to lose data should always be the default.

matibee

(Posted 2012) [#5]

Yes I'm aware of that one xlsior, thanks.

My problem is I've spent the last 10+ years working with some very expensive cad software who's dialogs are just awful. This one for example stumps every new user I've ever trained up and even some experienced users I've come across still don't understand it...

The selected data contains [blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah]. Would you like to export anyway?

You can either:
[a] fix everything by hand and [blah][blah]
[blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah]
[blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah]

[b] [blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah]
[blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah]
[blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah]

[c] [blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah]
[blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah]
[blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah][blah]

                      [ Yes ] [ No ]

Nobody understands why there's only a Yes or No option but of course you have to go back several paragraphs to find the original question.

So I'm not taking any reference from the software I'm stuck to working with all day every day - except how not to do it.