142737 - "Send Receipt" and "Don't send receipt" instead of "OK and CANCEL"

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Backend, enhancement)

Description

[Hakon]

Something trivial...
The alert box asks: "Do you wish to notify the sender?"
Then there's two buttons, OK and CANCEL.
Should it be: YES and NO ?
Or maybe the explicit way: NOTIFY and DON'T NOTIFY

Comment 1

[R.K.Aa.]

changing severity to RFE since this is obviously by design and not a bug.
(OK and Cancel WFM btw. I see no need to change this.)

Comment 2

[Mark Mayo]

I would say "yes" or "no" - something from Nielsen's Usability Heuristics would
dictate this I'm sure :)  Falls under simple and natural dialogue rule - if you
were asked that question, without options to click, would you reply "yes/no" or
"ok/cancel"?  I think the "yes/no" option is definitely more appropriate.

Comment 3

[timeless]

unfortunately our ui nazi mpt objects to our use of yes/no in cases where it makes perfect sense.

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

confirming that we should change the buttons or the question.

Comment 5

[grylchan]

in 4.x:
'The sender of the message requested a return receipt
to be returned. Do you wish to send one?'
  Ok and Cancel buttons.

Comment 6

[Andreas Troschka]

A 1st level rule in UI programmation is:

Make it as simple as possible!

Standardized colloquial UI should be mantained. 
The use of variously flavoured texts on selection buttons (even if apparently
more user friendly) should be avoided.
The right way to obtain fine interactions is formulating questions in the right
way, to accomodate answers, (btw. selections), from the user, to few (button) texts.
Readability and useability of the UI will be enhanced in this way.

Please, never forget this!

Comment 7

[Mark Mayo]

Right then - how about changing the text to read "Press OK to notify the sender"
and having OK/Cancel buttons?

Comment 8

[Bruce Davidson]

*** Bug 119152 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Ray Birks]

See also Bug 118684.

Comment 10

[Matt Judy]

The reporter of this bug hit the nail right on the head...

"Or maybe the explicit way: NOTIFY and DON'T NOTIFY"

Exactly.  On a lower level, the dialog should probably be more specific about
what's going on; the fact that you are sending a reciept.  Then you could have
buttons which more clearly decribe what will happen when they're clicked: "Send
Reciept" and "Don't Send".

Comment 11

[Bruce Davidson]

*** Bug 166163 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[timeless]

The fact is that the default should not be to send a receipt (bug 166164) so
OK/Cancel is really inappropriate. I think the right thing to do is to adopt
suggestions from bug 166165 which is basically that a receipt doesn't need a dialog.

Comment 13

[Keith Lea]

Hi, I got this dialog today, and the OK/Cancel annoyed me too, because my answer
in English was "No." Just so you guys know this person isn't the first to notice it.

Comment 14

[WD]

*** Bug 198872 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 15

[Bruce Davidson]

*** Bug 217547 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 16

[Patrick]

What is the current policy on wording for dialogs?

I kinda like the OS X way of doing things, where at least one of the buttons
includes a verb.

Related: bug 168231, bug 177774 and bug 118684.

Comment 17

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

*** Bug 331398 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 18

[Elliotte Rusty Harold]

Using Notify/Don't Notify instead of OK/Cancel; or Yes/No is an explicit part of Apple's Human Interface Guidelines.

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/XHIGControls/chapter_18_section_2.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000359-TPXREF186


"Button names should be verbs that describe the action performed—Save, Close, Print, Delete, and so on. If a button acts on a single setting, label the button as specifically as possible; “Choose Picture…,” for example, is more helpful than “Choose…” Because most buttons initiate an immediate action, it shouldn’t be necessary to use “now” (Scan Now, for example) in the label. Don’t use push buttons to indicate a state such as On or Off (where it would be more appropriate to use checkboxes)."

Thus this should probably be "Notify Sender/Don't Notify Sender". This particular Apple guideline makes sense across platforms. i.e. it's not just an arbitrary artifact of the Mac like the placement of the minimimze button. It reflects how all humans interact with computers.

For more on this see http://www.fltk.org/hig.php Note especially, "In almost all cases, an input dialog window will have a "Cancel" button along with one or more action buttons. The action buttons should be labeled with unambiguous verbs or phrases indicating their actions and not generic words like "Yes", "No", and "OK". The general rule of thumb is this: if you can remove everything from the window except the buttons and still have a meaningful dialog, then you have the right labels on your buttons:"

There's no cancel action here.

Comment 19

[Edmund Wong (:ewong)]

Current behaviour is now a notification bar with (Ignore Request/ Send Receipt).
So this bug is WFM.