Where to put those buttons?
After a long afternoon designing web forms with fellow studio geek Terence, we struck up a healthy debate on the position of form buttons.
One form in particular required a cancel and a continue button. We both agreed that the cancel button was a negative action, and the continue button was a positive action. To illustrate further, I have put together a quick list of negative and positive actions.
Negative actions
- Cancel
- Don’t Save
- No
- Previous
Positive actions
Where we failed to see eye to eye was the position of these buttons. My preference was to place the positive button on the right, and the negative button on the left. This is based upon my instinctive expectation of expecting the Continue or Save button on the right.
Another view, strongly supported by Terence, was that the negative action should be placed on the right, with the positive on the left.
After debating the issue for all of 10 minutes, we decided to look at why Terence’s expectations differed so much from mine. After a bit of head scratching and a strong cup of tea, it dawned on us, an epiphany if you like - I had used a Mac for for last 20 years, whilst Terence has used Windows.
We took a look at dialogue panes generated by the 2 operating systems, and lo and behold, Windows displays the positive action on the left, whilst the OSX displays the positive action on the right.
So, we got to the bottom of our difference of opinion and conflicting expectations - but where does this leave us in terms of best practice?
I still stand firm in my belief that the positive action should always be placed on the right. But what it is also important to remember that we should always consider user expectations when developing any kind of user interface elements. This underpins our approach to all of our design projects - whilst we always try to push the envelope (did I just say push the envelope?) in terms of design, we always take in to account user expectations, and best practice procedures.
Let us know what you think. Are you a Mac or a PC user? Would you expect to see the positive action on the left or right?
Posted By: Ciaron
25 June 2009