
Buttons on the Web: Placement and Order - wx196
https://medium.com/@GreatUX/buttons-placement-and-order-bb1c4abadfcb
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gioele
Let us not forget GoneME: A fork of GNOME that started with the "Buttonorder"
patch, a patch to revert the then recently committed change from "OK"/"Cancel"
to "Cancel/OK".

> Reverting the Buttonorder is one of the things that I would like to see done
> and the first approaches into that direction has been started. When the
> specific MacOSX way of Buttonorder was introduced it so what caused troubles
> for me and other participants of GNOME that people filled pages with
> complaints and rants because it irritates them when they use GNOME
> applications together with KDE, MOTIF, GNOME 1 etc. applications. They are
> not consistent anymore and that's an argument for me to revert back. All
> these nice usability studies - good or bad - but changing something a user
> got used too for many years is not the best decision and then trying to
> enforce the same on KDE isn't good either. Some of these people are even
> going that far that they tell everyone that everything else as order is
> wrong and must be reported as bug. It's totally regardless for them what the
> opinion of users are, what only matters is that they must be right because
> they say so.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180902122151/http://www.akcaag...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180902122151/http://www.akcaagac.com/index_goneme.html)

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thomasqbrady
This is a very complex topic that’s been studied and discussed for decades.
Further study and discussion is great, but this article didn’t add much beyond
some opinion.

The author misses half the concern of button layout: target acquisition, or
“how long, once I’ve found the button I want to use, does it take to tab to
it/move my mouse to it/tap it and how likely am I to miss (and potentially hit
a different element/button with potentially frustrating or disastrous
results)?”

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HomLoc
As for mouse path, it is right in the beginning of the article, images with
green dashed "paths".

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thomasqbrady
Those are the paths traced by your eyes. It does say “and often the mouse,”
but it’s describing reading, and the common habit of following along with the
mouse cursor as you read. IF you are the kind of person who does this, it puts
the mouse cursor in the right place for you when you’re ready to click. This
does not help, A) people who don’t do that, B) people who are using a keyboard
or assistive device, or C) people using a mobile/touch device.

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alexmorley
For me personally left buttons are often annoying on mobile as I have a wide
phone (like lots of people) which I hold with my right hand (like lots of
people) meaning I'd need to stretch or use my other hand to press the button.

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Izmaki
Much of what is discussed in this article as something "we should try out" is
already a well-researched topic:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_grouping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_grouping)

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codingdave
Forms on the early web almost always had everything left aligned. There simply
wasn't that much formatting to begin with. I know it is gross over-
simplification, but it felt like the first half of that article spent a ton of
time just telling us to go back to our roots.

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nixpulvis
I wonder how true this is across human languages and cultures.

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istjohn
I feel like unless you are Microsoft, Google, Apple, or similar, you should
opt for whatever is most intuitive to your audience, and that will be whatever
convention is predominant in the other products they use. An analysis of the
most rational, internally consistent usage is moot. If your customers have
been trained by Apple to expect "first right" in horizontal button layouts and
"first top" in vertical button layouts, it's irrelevant that this is
inconsistent with English reading order of left-to-right and top-down. Unless
you have the power to move the entire culture, such considerations shouldn't
enter the picture.

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wx196
I don't see any issue when you have one order for horizontal layout and
another for vertical as well. But there are examples in acticle that show
inconsistency in horizontal layout for different cases and this can be an
issue.

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ProxCoques
The meta-observation here is that before you think about whether you need a
dialog, consider whether you can design the system such that it doesn't need
one in the first place.

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auct
From the images one can make conclusion that positive button is closer to the
corner. So when buttons left, positive will be left, when buttons are right
positive is also right

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Animats
The button which generates the most revenue for the web site will be largest,
first, and the default.

