A little bit of a mini-rant here but jeez quit switching the ok and cancel buttons on your menus! I know this is probably done so people won’t accidently do something they dont wanna do but you actually make them do it more often. Yes/Ok/Accept should ALWAYS be on the LEFT. NO/Stop/Cancel should always be on the right! Don’t try and switch it up. The same goes for cell phones! Quit mixing up the talk and hang up buttons!
Good pitting. Really. Not so much on the software thing - I’ve never seen any program where the OK/cancel bits were switched - but definitely on the cell phone thing.
I usually see this on many console video games. Which makes me mad because its usually asking me if i wanna save… Many less mainstream software does this
Click (OK) to Cancel or (Continue) to Quit.
I see this with a particular data entry interface (for medical research information) that I use for work. All of the studies I work on have “OK” on the left, “Cancel” on the right - except for one. And every single time I open up that database, for the first form and a few at intervals thereafter, I screw it up.
I think OK on the right and Cancel on the left is more common in the Mac world.
On the other hand, if following the Mac convention, both buttons are supposed to be positioned near the right hand side of the window, whereas the buttons are normally centred in the window under the Windows convention. That should hopefully help provide a visual clue as to what is going on. If you see buttons that are centred in the window, but with OK on the right button, they are definitely doing it wrong.
Nope, they should be right-aligned in Windows.
ETA: In the Vista guidelines, of course, you’ll also see “command links” which are left-aligned with the main content of the secondary window.
See here for button usage guidelines.
Eh? Since when? I’ve always seen them as centered in the Windows dialog boxes I’ve programmed.
I just fired up VB .NET to test it out. A simple call to display a message box with OK and Cancel buttons placed them squarely in the center.
I’m on XP, so maybe the conventions in Vista changed.
atomicbadgerrace, your post came in as I was editing mine the second time. See the link I added for the guidelines. In standard XP secondary dialogs, the buttons should still be right-aligned; I suspect the msgbox control is actually a different kind of control than dialog boxes, which may account for the different button placement.
Excellent pitting. Best of 2008, IMO.
This drives me nuts with Security Certificate Error warnings in Internet Explorer:
[ul][Green Check Mark]Close this page
[li][Red X]Continue[/ul][/li]
Argh. It’s exactly like one of those “Click the colour, and not the word!” games, except that it’s not intended to make you click the opposite of what you actually want to - right?
You want to make sure that the thing the unthinking user is most likely to click is the safest choice.
Its not limited to software installed on PCs, either. On some message boards the “Submit Reply” and “Preview Post” buttons are swapped, some boards even have a “Save” button for some inexplicable reason. Drives me batty.
Ok, I see your point. I was thinking about message box and simple dialog (like a progress window, for example), where the buttons are almost always centred on Windows and right-aligned on Mac. But now that I’ve thought about it, yeah the buttons are right-aligned even on Windows for more complicated dialogs.
In the environment I work in, there is not a dedicated OK button and a dedicated Cancel button; there is, instead, a “first button”, a “second button”, and where necessary a “third button” and the developer adds the text. Sometimes the choices will be “OK” and “Cancel”. (Those are, in fact, the defaults). Sometimes you just want an “OK” button as the only choice. Sometimes the choices are totally different like “Print” versus “FAX” or umm “Submit Reply” versus “Preview Post” 
The programming environment lets you trap by which numbered button the user clicked, e.g.
If [Get(LastMessageChoice)=1]
…Do Stuff
Else
…Do Other Stuff Instead
End If
The default is that the OK button is far right and cancel is to its left, with the OK the default button. (Mac conventions, in other words, regardless of platform).
On a Windows PC, annoyingly enough, the dialog itself has one of those close-window widgets and if that is clicked on, so as to close the window, the environment behaves as if the default button had been clicked.
You see why some developers would think that maybe the default behavior had better be “cancel” and not “OK” in that kind of situation?
There may be similar reasons “under the hood” why some developers reverse what you are used to.
Or not. Some developers just don’t care about conventions and expectations and do their own thing.
My Safeway touch card swipers at a certain point in the checkout process have 4 choices in the corners. Debit / Credit / Gift Card / Cancel. For some reason about 2 months ago, some genius software coder thought that in the latest update all of the positions should be rotated clockwise by one position.
Cue me constantly hitting the wrong selections by reflex for the next two months and becoming “that person” who can’t seem to work the card swiper and holds up everyone in line.
Often it’s reversed–and reverses BACK–to prove you are a human and not a bot. Humans can read what you programmers write on buttons. Since it is often just a bitmap when the bots see it they cannot.
I get mildly irked when I see this kind of swapping on Point of Sale systems. Just when you get used to the questions and buttons in a certain order, they update the software and change the order.
One POS system that I have to careful with it the one at Petsmart. The input pad asks you if you want cash back and you press “No”. Then it asks you if you want to donate $1 for homeless pets. The “Yes” and “No” buttons are on opposite sides than those on the first screen. Then it asks if the total is correct. The “Yes” and “No” buttons swap back the the positions in the first screen.
I don’t suspect any trickery on the part of Petsmart, I suspect that the “donate” screen was added to the software after it was considered complete and it was likely added by someone other than the original coder. But, it’s still annoying.
FYI, you’re pitting the wrong people. Software Developers rarely make these kinds of decisions. It’s the marketing people who decide on how the screens look. Us code slingers look at stuff like that and say “um, people are gonna hate that” and then the marketing guys say “No! It’s a great feature! It makes sense! We like it that way.”
Depending on how much experience the code slinger has, he/she may or may not protest again. The experienced people don’t bring it up again, because they’ve been through this so many times they know that it’s a waste of time. They just go off and code it the way the idiot marketing guys want.
Then, six months later, when there’s enough complaints from customers because the damn buttons are in the wrong place, you get a very discreet email from noone in particular with a bug fix request asking you to switch them around. You switch them around and smile to yourself, then go on to the next stupid thing the marketing fucks want you to do.
Sounds like the cell phone I have. Usually, the right-hand button is the equivalent of a computer’s escape key.
One big exception: if you’re on the screen that displays the number the phone calls to access voice mail, pushing the right-hand button will erase the last digit in the display. There is no way to restore it. Hilarity does not ensue.
So I spent a half hour or more on the phone talking with various people from whom English is, at best, a second language before somebody finally figured out what I meant by “I need the phone number for my voice mail.” :mad: