[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Button ordering can now adapt to desktop default ... in some places

[Stefan Knorr]

Hi all,

during the ESC call, it was discussed that some dialogues can now
reorder their bottom [OK] [Cancel] etc. buttons to match the button
ordering of the desktop.
I.e., on Windows or KDE we'd have a [OK] [Cancel] row, and on
Mac/Gnome we'd have a [Cancel] [OK] row. Personally, I think that is
really cool!

Unfortunately, the big wart here is the "some dialogues" part: if such
an important part of our UI is inconsistent, that is really just
asking for a lot of bug reports.
The underlying problem is something alogn the lines that people don't
actually read buttons (maybe the first time they use the dialogue, but
certainly not later on) – they more or less blindly click where they
think the affirmative action is sitting. Within the context of
LibreOffice that used to be either the far left (horizontal button
row) or the top (vertical button row) [1].
So, we'd need a way to keep this consistent until almost every
dialogue is converted to be able to use native ordering ... without
stopping people from testing the native ordering.
=> Experimental mode for now?


Astron.


[1] The one unfortunate exception in stable releases are the Load/Save
dialogues – they are using the native button ordering. I think people
recognise these as system dialogues since they look nothing like
LibreOffice either, so it is not as huge a problem.