Recreating the button

Re:Recreating the button by timcederman on Thursday February 05, 2009 @01:47AM (#467270)

The worst part is the new button styles don't add anything, except a jarring sense that something has changed.

(further bringing to attention that there are now too many buttons)

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Re:Recreating the button by JoelSutherland on Thursday February 05, 2009 @07:23AM (#467661)

I disagree. The "Move to" button was a great addition. I have a "Needs Response" label in Gmail that I keep full of things I must act on. When I get email, I immediately move it from my inbox.

Without this button I needed to first label the message and then archive it. Now it is one action. For anyone that uses labels in any way like folders, this was an awesome improvement.

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Re:Recreating the button by timcederman on Thursday February 05, 2009 @04:47PM (#468793)

I agree "move to" is useful. I'm just surprised, given Gmail Labs, that they made this a default button.

The one 'nice' thing about not having it was that it forced me to create filters to automatically label all my email.

I actually really like the new label functionality. Multi-select and autocomplete textbox is very nice. However the problem I see there is now every action looks the same. Before you had drop downs, and it made it easy to find what you wanted to do. Hence my too many buttons comment.

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Re:Recreating the button by litewulf on Thursday February 05, 2009 @04:45PM (#468790)

I think he's talking about the style of the buttons and not their functionality.

(I disagree, I think the buttons are good because they allow both fast keyboard access in addition to mouse friendliness. This behaviour differs from regular buttons and it seems reasonable for them to look different.)

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Re:Recreating the button by timcederman on Thursday February 05, 2009 @04:49PM (#468798)

Yep, I was more talking about the style. I do quite like the keyboard functionality, but 99% of Gmail users will never notice/use it sadly.

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Re:Recreating the button by cdr on Thursday February 05, 2009 @01:22PM (#468412)

I think they're actively worse than old, normal buttons - the way they run into each other means I have to expend more effort to figure out where the button I want to click is, and then be more careful when I click it lest I hit the wrong one.

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Re:Recreating the button by jwilliams on Thursday February 05, 2009 @03:27AM (#467394)

There is also now a trend to mix button and hyperlink styles - usually where one has emphasis - e.g. (Save) _cancel_

This works visually, but I think it really tramples on a lot of UI metaphor.

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Re:Recreating the button by ahpeeyem on Friday February 06, 2009 @06:22AM (#469617)

I thought doing this was to obey the web usability rule of "Links must never change state, while buttons could potentially change state." - the REST model, e.g. if you click a button you're going to modify/submit something, if you click a link you're just going to go somewhere else.

This makes sense in the [Save] _Cancel_ case at least, I'm sure there are apps that aren't consistent though.

A blog post with some ideas on the matter: http://www.svennerberg.com/2008/09/the-use-of-buttons-in-web...

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