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Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok

factorio.com

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Re: Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok

#251

Post by morganvachon »

hamsterscan wrote: post #110
c3534l wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in film the convention is that if you're character is going back, standing in the way of another character moving the plot forward, or just feeling weak or uncertain, they should face the left. When was the last platformer you saw where you moved left to progress? The right hand side conventionally portrays certainty, strength, and progress in all manner of western arts.

Since you asked... About half of the first Castlevania is right-to-left. There are plenty of cues as to where to go, so you never really notice it. On the other hand -- it's set in an evil castle, with dark muddy colors and a minor-key soundtrack. So maybe the right-to-left motion is intended to make the player feel uncomfortable.

Most of the 2D Castlevania series, really. Later releases like SoTN had the player go back and forth multiple times through certain levels to fully progress, and even had a version of the castle flipped upside down which made the player think on their feet (no pun intended).

Re: Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok

#252

Post by benjaminjackman »

lfowles wrote: post #67
c3534l wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in film the convention is that if you're character is going back, standing in the way of another character moving the plot forward, or just feeling weak or uncertain, they should face the left. When was the last platformer you saw where you moved left to progress? The right hand side conventionally portrays certainty, strength, and progress in all manner of western arts.

Your post plus the context of Factorio brings about an interesting observation that in all of my Factorio maps, expansion/exploration happens rightwards and upwards unless constrained by geography.

Now that you mention it I have a similar observation. Though I tend to build downward rather than upwards when laying out columns of factories coming over a central bus.

Also when constrained by geography I subconsciously have been seeking out new areas with enough space to resume building left to right like a printer executing a carriage return rather than zig zagging backwards (which perhaps could be more efficient).

Since I’ve noticed that factorio mimics a lot of patterns from the real world I wonder if this prevalent in some other areas eg integrated circuit or circuit board layouts.

Re: Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok

#253

Post by abrowne »

badsectoracula wrote: post #220
abrowne wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux it's OK-Cancel. KDE yes, but GNOME and most GTK+ desktops and apps are definitely Cancel/OK. Google used to be pretty mixed, but Android and the Material re-designed stuffs seems to be pretty much Cancel/OK too.

As i show in another reply below, it is only GNOME/GTK that does Cancel/OK, while every other environment and toolkit does OK/Cancel - this includes KDE, Tk, Motif, FLTK and even some classic X11 apps like `bitmap` use OK/Cancel. This is also the case with console-based UIs, like dialog, picotui and free vision which all use OK/Cancel. So GNOME/GTK is really the odd one out going against what everyone else is doing.…

I'm not disagreeing, but on the Ubuntu MATE computer I'm using now, for graphical apps at least, I have only have apps using GTK+ — including partial users like Firefox —, Qt and wxWidgets (plus mpv, which doesn't seem to have any dialogs anyway). Qt and wxWidgets adapt to GTK+ conventions when used with GTK, or use parts of GTK+, like open/save dialogs, so everything, or nearly so, that I use is Cancel/OK.

I think GNOME started intentionally copying MacOS starting with the GTK+ 2 days.

Out of curiosity, I just installed Blender, which uses its own custom toolkit. The only dialogs I could find were open and save, and it has the open/save actions on top and cancel below. (That's actually what unstyled(?) Qt apps' open/save dialogs do too, as I've just seen in KeepassXC installed as a Snap.) That's one way to not take sides here ;-)

Re: Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok

#254

Post by llcoolv »

jeremyjh wrote: post #239
llcoolv wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol. good luck running a bash script that does a bunch of 'rm's.

His aliases wouldn't be in scope there.

Thanks a lot! Here is a better explanation https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/362546/what-is-the-... . This seems like a decent gap in my knowledge.

Is it still going to be out of scope if he e.g. runs the shell script from the shell?

Re: Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok

#255

Post by unabst »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #19

This has been a debate for as long as I've been a UX designer (mid '90s), and probably much longer. Ultimately, the answer about this UX style is very much the same as a question about writing style—there's no objectively right answer, but you have to be consistent. For example, you can pick up any number of style books from Strunk & White to the Chicago Manual of Style and get different "right" answers about writing…

Not just internally consistent, but externally consistent, at which point making this a matter of compliance.

External consistence isn't subjective. It's as objective to that system as any other fact, and is a matter of understanding, not feeling or choosing or designing.

If you're building an extension to MS Office, make your app comply with MS Office. Same with Adobe Photoshop plugins. And ultimately same with apps/programs for an OS.

If the OS does OK-left, do OK-left.

The UI that does not exist is the UI that is performing the best.

No one "uses" a UI. They just pass it. If you're thinking too hard about it, chances are you'll make your users think about it also. And trying to get noticed will always be at the expense of usability.

And finally, metrics such as consistency, obviousness/coherence, and simplicity are also objectively measurable, as are error rates, A/B tests, and step counts. What is subjective is user feedback and even developer feedback. By tallying what people think of an interface, you've already abandoned the goal of remaining unnoticed, and this is how Frankenstein UIs are built.

Re: Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok

#256

Post by ECrownofFire »

santix wrote: post #20
scrollaway wrote: post #6

HN folks will appreciate the entire Factorio blog. They are super open about the design of their game and it's full of micro-postmortems. https://www.factorio.com/blog/ Also, if you're reading this, you are in a demographic that is likely to absolutely love Factorio. Go buy it, it's 20 eur/usd, you won't regret it. Some call it "Programming: The Game".

I was surprised at the minimum requirements. I don't know if I'm not up to date with current games, but from the style of it I thought it would be much lighter.

I play it on a Thinkpad T410 with an i5-M520 and it runs fairly decently. If an old laptop with a first generation i5 can run it, anything can lol

Re: Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok

#257

Post by jeremyjh »

llcoolv wrote: post #254
jeremyjh wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His aliases wouldn't be in scope there.

Thanks a lot! Here is a better explanation https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/362546/what-is-the-... . This seems like a decent gap in my knowledge. Is it still going to be out of scope if he e.g. runs the shell script from the shell?

Not if the alias is in .bashrc / .zshrc and they execute the shell script in the normal way. If they source the script, sure. But no one runs scripts that way, for this exact reason.

Re: Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok

#258

Post by Theodores »

JohnStrangeII wrote: post #219
jaysonelliot wrote: post #19

This has been a debate for as long as I've been a UX designer (mid '90s), and probably much longer. Ultimately, the answer about this UX style is very much the same as a question about writing style—there's no objectively right answer, but you have to be consistent. For example, you can pick up any number of style books from Strunk & White to the Chicago Manual of Style and get different "right" answers about writing…

There is a simpler reason. Apple introduced the GUI (licensed from Xerox) with the Okay button to the right. Microsoft Windows decided to go the other way for legal reasons and in order to look different. Companies make these 'slightly different' approaches often and probably usually to avoid design patent issues.

Makes sense to me.

Microsoft also put the toolbar with the menu for getting to your programs a the bottom with the 'Start' menu, this really should have been at the top. Apple had their menu at the top so Microsoft did it differently. In those days I found it absurd how you had menus flowing out from the bottom left of the screen. Moving the menu to the top was drag and drop but nobody bothered, therefore having it wasn't that big a deal.

Microsoft had to work with IBM on the original Windows so they got a lot of things right including the universal shortcut keys for menu actions. You were never left requiring a mouse except for in MS Paint.

Surely the file dialog boxes and whatnot were designed to 'not look different' but tied in to this universal hotkey thing they had going, i.e. some sensible rule so you could tab or arrow key away from the 'OK' button?

Re: Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok

#259

Post by Too »

latexr wrote: post #241
Too wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, you have to manually activate such an option? On windows it's default. One of the things i love about windows is that it's always been designed for keyboard only use, not just bolted on as an afterthought. Every dialog, widget, application and feature can be used with only the keyboard and it's fast, easy and predictable how to. Unfortunately since windows 8 there's been some regressions in this area with the ne…

> Wow, you have to manually activate such an option? On windows it's default. I don’t think that’s deserving of “wow”. I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. It’s a clear option that is quite visible and present in the exact preference pane you’d expect. And you don’t need to activate it manually. You can do it via CLI: defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleKeyboardUIMode -int 3 > not just bolted on as an afterthought.…

Once a friend of mine with a mac suddenly had a mouse malfunction, can't remember if it was broken or just out of battery but doesn't matter. He was literally stranded, and this is developer who knows how to use a terminal and a keyboard. Everything we were working had to be put on hold, i can't remember the exact scenario but we couldn't even save the document, unlock the machine, get to a terminal or something like. Having keyboard accessibility enabled as default would have saved our ass that day.

Re: Ok-Cancel versus Cancel-Ok

#260

Post by Sylos »

oldcynic wrote: post #249
ProxCoques wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When it comes to OK/Cancel for a non-recoverable event (like delete), it's ALWAYS been the case that the dialogue should NOT appear in the first place. Instead, the UI should be seen to do the operation, but then delay its execution while showing an "undo" for a few seconds. The reason for this is that 99.9% of people know what they're doing. So don't bother them for the sake of the 0.1% who make a mistake. But more…

I've never come across that recommendation before. I can't immediately think of a case where I'd want that or it would be anything but annoying. > 99.9% of people know what they're doing You have very different users than those of anything I've ever written then. :)

I think, Google recommends this for Android application development. Not that I would consider Google a shining beacon of great UIs.

Well, and it is also much easier to quickly locate and hit an Undo-button on a small touch screen than it is with a mouse on a giant screen.

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