Button order preference
lefreut
Member Posts: 1,462
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- Button order preference51 votes
- Vanilla/1.3 (Done on the left, Cancel on the right)47.06%
- 2.3 (Cancel on the left, Done on the right)52.94%
Post edited by lefreut on
5
Comments
Baldur's gate is the oddball out on this one, for me.
When we go into a screen and edit something, it's much more likely that we want to accept those edits than cancel them. Else why would we have made the edits. Hence, Done is the more natural button to press.
Combine that with most languages being written from left to right, it makes total sense that buttons are scanned from left to right as well, so Done should be the first button your eyes come across, not Cancel.
Both logics are good, each person will find one or the other more natural.
Let's say that you want to set a sequencer, you open the window casting the spell, than you select the spells to put in the trigger and finally you confirm, that is the normal flow, if you decide to abort the sequencer creation after you have started it you are well aware that the usual flow has been disrupted.
I just fail to see how that relates to Accept being on the right side.
But I was thinking about it and maybe logic is not the word we must use dealing with this kind of things, instead we must talk of what is more intuitive or natural to a person. And the fact that this poll at now results in a draw shows how the ting is really subjective, some of us have chosen for an analogy of other games behavior, others for an analogy with operating systems, others for an analogy with text flow in western languages.
When I quoted you I told "Both logics are good, each person will find one or the other more natural", you feel more natural to have it to the left because so it occupy the first place in the last row, I feel the opposite because so it ends better the flow of actions, but in the end both our positions are just rationalizations of what we feel more natural almost instinctively.
When the dialog box is larger, both buttons are down and right.
But the line that holds the Cancel and the Done button is not a line you progress along. Your progress doesn't take you along the Cancel button.
Logic dictates Done is on the left, not the right, because it's generally more important than the Cancel button.
But it's really about what people find more convenient and intuitive.
If the option is on the right, the accept is there too. Cancel is always furthest away.
It is all about reducing mouse movement and having to flip your eyes too much when reading. That is also why western style buttons are on the righthandside of the text. Putting them on the left is counter intuitive
Verification follows right after the reading direction.
For Windows, the interaction part of the window is in the center of the screen, the verification is on the right because it expects western style users.
If you have a piece of text then the interaction button (boolean or string/value input) follows after, again western style is right.
If the accept and cancel buttons are far far away from the last clickable item or readable item, or if it is in another frame of reference (pop ups), then the accept is on the side where you expect the user to start reading. So for Western style, if you get two boxes you always expect them to start reading the contents of the left box before going to the box on its right.
Confirmation is the first thing you want users to see and it follows the reading direction because they are taught to read that way (i.e. not taught through brainwashing).
Confirmation is the first thing you want users to see just because of marketing reasons as well. Accept these terms no matter what by clicking this next button... Even if the acceptance is totally optional (newsletter subscriptions).
I think it is way more interesting to know which of the voters is actually non-native left-to-right-reader because that should affect their choice the most.
Consistency in location would, at least to me, feel more important than being closer to what could have been the most recently pressed box. If due to the layout of the rest of the window, the Accept button is sometimes on the left, and sometimes on the right, that would to me feel like terrible ui design.
Consistency between windows is also part of the ui design. If someone made the reading and movement flow of all the windows differently then they made a poor design.
Suppose one window focuses you to look from left to right and the next from top to bottom, you would go crazy. Those changes in focus and flow can only truly be done if the reference frame is 100% changed, so it does not work well for in-game or in-menu transitions but will work decently between menu-game transitions... and for bg, this scenario is actually only mainmenu-game transitions and not between inventory-spellbook etc menus because those screens are in-game ui parts.