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Colin Mullikin wrote: (OK in bottom right corner, Cancel to the left of it)
Which is the sane way to do it. When I first started using Windows in the 3.1 days, I kept clicking on the the Cancel button by accident because that intuitively seemed to be the most logical place for "continue on to the next dialog." I've always that that the way Microsoft decided to do it was bassackwards. And no, I don't believe Microsoft "studied" the problem or knows anything more about good UI design than I do. Just look at W8 for proof.
Colin Mullikin wrote: The next time he brings it up I might punch him in the face.
Nah, swat him on the butt and ask him if you broke his nose. Obviously he's got his head where his arse is, just like his idea for where the OK and Cancel buttons should be.
Marc
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Consistency is the key...
But I'm curious. Am I the only person who uses .net msgbox's and hence to achieve consistency you have to use OK-Cancel.
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Simple solution is to have a OkayCancelButtons composite control that you can use a style setting to choose which way round they appear. Default is Cancel/Okay and QA mode is Okay/Cancel
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Doing this is entirely situational, switching the OK/Cancel buttons on a few dialogue boxes now and then so that the end user actually has to pay attention as to what they are doing rather than just clicking OK on everything while being a zoned out drone. Alternately you can randomise the OK/Cancel button so that on some dialogue boxes they are switched and on others not, but when the program is used a second time, the OK/Cancel buttons may be in the reverse order.
But if you don't mind your users being zoned out drones then there is no legitimate reason to switch them.
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Does seem kinda dumb to have them the wrong way around
Windows has had them the same way around for way more than a decade
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Change all the 'OK' buttons to 'This is what I want to do'
and 'Cancel' to 'I do not wish to change my mind'
The advantage of this is that you will have no room for any other buttons,
so you can't change their test.!
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Colin Mullikin wrote: That is his one and only reason
Unfortunately it is a good reason.
One thing I learned is that users complain a lot, but very often they adapt within a few hours of the rollout. Those that can't adapt are those that couldn't work with it in the first place.
Besides 200 dialogs is not thát much. Yes it is a bloody annoying and tedious job. it will keep you busy for the better part of the day, but that's about it.
But I can imagine it's not much fun to be told to do something when you did it differently for so long.
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But before they adapt, your highest paying customer forces the account manager to tell you to put it back as it was in the first place. Mean while, the lowest paying customers have already adapted to the change and complain when you change it back.
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Well, you should have thought of that before you did such a piss poor design... 
Anything that is unrelated to elephants is irrelephant
Anonymous
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The problem with quotes on the internet is that you can never tell if they're genuine
Winston Churchill, 1944
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I'd just like a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
Me, all the time
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I came to Windows from RISC OS, where OK was in the bottom right, two decades ago, and I still think that it's the correct layout.
If MS thinks it's right for the order to be OK - Cancel, why don't they use Next - Prev too?
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Way back, in the old days when MS and IBM were friends, was developed a standard called the Common User Access, CUA, giving the common guidelines for Windows, OS/2 and Motif user interfaces. The CUA was published as an IBM document, but was endorsed by MS (and I believe several other companies). Windows 3 was developed in close to 100% adherence to the CUA rules.
The CUA stated clearly that normal completion of a dialog is done by clicking the button in the lower right corner. In other words, OK to the right.
The first CUA rule (at least among the essential ones) were the location of the Help menu: CUA requires it to be pushed to the very right on the menu line. I don't remember when MS decided to move it together with the other pulldown menus; that could be in Win 3.11. We started out with consistency where you by instinct clicked the bottom right button to complete normally, to a transition period where an increaing fraction of the applications made you follow your instincts, swear, and redo the entire dialog, this time reading the button texts closely, to the current situation where everything is so inconsistent and free of rules that you cannot rely on instincts but must read all the buttons anyway. ("But OUR software is consistent" - sure, the good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. Most customers buy software from several different vendors.)
Whenever I make user interfaces, I follow the CUA rule of normal termination being the bottom right button. Nowadays, all user must read the button labels anyway, so this is as good a choice as any other. Or even better, since I can justify my choice by referring to a user interface standard document. (True enough: It was published more than 25 years ago, but it is far better than nothing).
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Member 7989122 wrote: that could be in Win 3.11
No, Win 3.11 was still good.
Member 7989122 wrote: the location of the Help menu: CUA requires it to be pushed to the very right on the menu line
I remember that and I wish I could still put it there, but WinForms doesn't seem to allow it. 
You'll never get very far if all you do is follow instructions.
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The period in my life when I had my highest frequency of swearing loudly at my office desk was when we used an editor that at exit might display a warning (this was before the mouse was common, so you responded through the keyboard:
"You have not saved the last modifications to the file. Do you want to save it before exiting? (Y/N)"
Of course you would immediately hit the "Y" key. Then we switched to another editor that had very much of the same style user interface, but it would give the warning:
"You have not saved the last modifications to the file. Do you really want to exit without saving? (Y/N)"
Obviously, from old habit, you hit the "Y" key. Then you would swear loudly and be grumpy for the rest of the day.
Moral: Don't play games with the user's old habits.
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Exactly.
But your example is quite different from the subject.
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Oh sure - there is no need to repeat exactly the same example.
I certainly would insist that it is not very different; it has to do with old habits. The CUA prescribed that the button to click to termminate a dialog normally should be the bottom rightmost one, and in the old days, all applications followed that recommendation. Then some software turned up where following the habit of clicking the bottom right button would NOT confirm all your entries, but cancel them.
That is very much the same as following your old habit of responding "Y" to a yes/no question, without reading the label. You loose your modifications is both cases.
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His reasoning is valid. It may not be sufficient to justify changing it, either because user annoyance more than counters it or simply because it's a reasonably large cost for a reasonably small gain, so he shouldn't keep pushing it if he's been rebuffed. But inconsistency with standard OS practices is a valid thing for a tester to complain about.
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It's guaranteed that most of your customers will complain if you change it since they will need to retrain all their users for that minor change. No doubt the original decision to place the buttons in the order you prefer was so the new users would cancel rather than choosing the usual ok.
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>>new users would cancel rather than choosing the usual ok.
That's the point: <b>WHO in his right mind would DO some action that he is most likely GOING TO CANCEL??!</b>
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I thought it worked like this:
Windows
OK Cancel
Mac
Cancel OK
Mobile
put the most likely button to be pressed closest to my right thumb, please!
(Especially important in landscape mode and as phone screens become larger)
I noticed that Rovio changed a few of its prompts between Angry Bird versions which my thumb appreciated.
In my brain it should follow the local reading order.
English L-R, OK/default Cancel.
Arabic R-L, Cancel OK/default
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Colin Mullikin wrote: For several months now, one of our testers has been pushing to get the OK and Cancel buttons switched in every single dialog in our application (roughly 200 dialogs). His only reasoning for this is that the way we do it (OK in bottom right corner, Cancel to the left of it) is the opposite of what Microsoft does throughout Windows(Cancel in bottom right corner, OK to the left of it).
That is his one and only reason. He fails to acknowledge that switching it will annoy the hell out of every single person that uses our software (thousands of people).
Testers don't write specs or or code. They test. That is all they do. As long as the interface adheres to the functional specs, the testers shouldn't even be talking about it. It wastes the team's time during the bug triage process. If the testers don't have functional specs to work from, that the Business Analyst's fault.
Colin Mullikin wrote: The next time he brings it up I might punch him in the face.
Ahhhhh, the Outlaw Programmer's favorite conflict resolution methodology. I like it. 
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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I would not only punch you in the face, I'd probably break skull of anyone who tries to make me "think RTL"! 
Try asking your friends "Do you not need coffe?", "Are you not going home already?". After twenty or so times they'll stop talking to you or beat the [random code] out of you.
PS: is't not that tester's fault that he got dragged into gay community. 
PS/2: I think I'll start saving money so I can travel to where GTK developers gather and start a massacre
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I agree that it should have been standardized to match the platform (Windows) your software runs on. Changing it now would be an annoyance to your users initially, but they'd get used to that. That said, is it worth the time to do it? Well, you'd have to determine that.
That said, the appropriate thing to do is use your time machine to go back and tell your designers to do it "right " the first time. 
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So you don't use the "Default" MessageBoxes? Did you (your company) create special "MessageBoxes" with Cancel/OK too? 
If you did so - I hope you also created your own "MessageBoxButtons" enumeration (MessageBoxButtons.OKCancel MessageBoxButtons.CancelOK
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