[Libreoffice] Better wording for 'Update links' question

[Christoph Noack]

Hi Kohei, hi Joe, all!

Am Mittwoch, den 22.12.2010, 15:11 -0500 schrieb Kohei Yoshida:
> On Wed, 2010-12-22 at 13:06 -0500, Joe Smith wrote:
> > On 12/21/2010 12:09 PM, Jan Holesovsky wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32548
> > >
> > > The bug says: when I open a certain .odp document, I get a pop-up
> > > question asking "Update all links? Yes/No"
> > >
> > > Anybody who knows this functionality, can you please provide a better
> > > wording? ;-)  Just post it here, I'll integrate it.
> > >
> > > Thank you a lot,
> > > Kendy
> > 
> > Believe me, I'm no fan of this cryptic prompt, but I'm afraid this won't 
> > be an improvement. The wording of the prompt is not the primary problem.
> 
> I'm not sure if I agree with that view.  This *will* be an improvement,
> and although the wording alone will not be enough to fix this
> *completely*, improving the wording itself is a step in the right
> direction.

+1

> > Experts already know what "Update links?" means; non-experts will not 
> > understand enough to answer the question correctly even with improved 
> > wording.
> 
> I disagree here.  You tend to polarize the users as either experts or
> non-experts.  There are those in between who want to make an informed
> decision and will understand the verbiage.  The user who reported the
> above bug is one such example.

Let's assume that we do have a so called "non-expert" here - since we
offer a modal dialog, what will he do with the current dialog? There is
no escape, he is forced to make an uninformed decision.

That is (one) reason why the proposed dialog contains a "[Keep]" button
that sounds somehow safe to click at - in any case.

> > All we accomplish by changing the wording is to make everyone 
> > read and deal with a longer and more complicated (and common!) 
> 
> No, making the warning verbose does not "make everyone read and deal
> with it".  Those who ignore such warnings will continue to ignore it
> just as easily even with a longer warning.
> 
> And the new wordings proposed so far are not even that long.

To the initial statement "everyone read and deal with a longer ...".
That is incorrect, as long as you refer to the text only. A dialog
provides some more ways to add information. As I said before, more
advanced users will benefit from the new buttons and the new dialog
title.

Moreover, such dialogs tend to be like words in the end - you don't read
the text, once you've memorized the dialog you guess based on the known
shape and overall appearance.

[...]

> > Would it be possible to have the prompt remain as it is, with a "Help" 
> > or "More" button that leads to some expanded explanation?

Given the fact that the "More" button might only show some few lines of
text - what does that additional click help?

But, you are right, that OOo/LibO has some of the most awkward dialog
concepts we can find today ... but let's first listen to Kohei.

> Relying on help for everything is a recipe for making poor UI.  Help is
> a last resort, and we need to do our best to design UI so that the user
> won't have to rely on Help.  In some situations we do need to rely on
> help to convey some complex scenarios to the user, but I don't think
> updating external links is one such example.
> 
> One thing I may agree is that maybe we need to have a two-level warning
> system that displays a summary of the warning, and the "Detail" button
> to show more information.  But we don't have such dialog implemented yet
> (feel free to correct me here), and until we do I would favor showing a
> more verbose and informative warning message than the current terse
> message that leaves some users confused and clueless.

Please look at "3.4.1 Alert Text" in the Gnome HIG:
http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/windows-alert.html.en#alert-text

Since the Gnome guys are known for good usability, let's assume that
this dialog design is well proven. There is:
      * Icon (not important, here)
      * Primary text (large size)
      * Secondary text (small size)
      * Buttons (might use custom caption)

This is a design we might go for - but technically, this hasn't been
possible in the past. There has been a discussion on OOo ux-discuss (but
I don't find the original message), where we added some additional text
within the dialog. A bad solution, but less bad than not addressing the
problem ...

So - if possible - please let's smoothly transition to that kind of
dialog content in the future. Although this will be hard for the
translation, because some of their translation memory won't work (since
there are more individual strings).

But Joe, you talked about the perfect solution - of course we may head
towards an ideal world in several steps. Ideally, Calc would
automatically detect whether the external data resources are available
and if they perform well. If yes, then Calc will automatically update
the data - and the user won't even notice that. If there are problems,
then the document will open anyways, but Calc might inform with a
non-modal message that some parts might not be up to date (in the best
case, Calc is also able to evaluate if external data changed). Primary
goal: Open the document as soon as possible, as complete and recent as
possible. Only bother the user if something really strange happens -
that cannot be handled by Calc (alone).

Until we are there, I'm happy with incremental progress ... although I'm
also happy if some of the ideas stated above might enlighten developers
as well ;-)

Cheers,
Christoph