Minimal

I’m sure someone must’ve said this before, but I can’t help thinking the OK, Cancel and Apply buttons that appear on property sheets throughout Windows are a little... suboptimal. Ignoring the button order (that’s a whole other issue), there’s the confusing nature of the Cancel button. Everything makes sense until you press Apply for the first time. Now, the behaviour of the Cancel button is something you have to learn, not something you can intuit. Will it reverse the changes you just made by clicking Apply? Or will it act more as a Close button, keeping your applied changes?

Actually, you probably can intuit the behaviour — after all, it’s still enabled and it still says Cancel. It’ll reverse the changes, right? Well, no, it won’t. In fact, the Cancel button now works like a Close button; exactly the same as the OK button at this point. Once you start making changes again, it becomes a Cancel for the new changes. The problem is that at no point in this transformation of roles does the button indicate its new behaviour e.g. by becoming a Close button or by greying out.

Perhaps the interface designers figured a changing button would be more confusing than the implemented behaviour. OR perhaps the OK/Cancel/Apply triplet was fatally flawed from the outset. But what might’ve been better? How about OK, Cancel and Preview? While the observed behaviour of a Preview button would be the same as that for Apply, there’s less confusion over whether it’s a permanent setting. If I cancel after previewing, I definitely expect the original settings to be restored. The behaviour of the Cancel button has become consistent for the duration of the property sheet’s existence. Predictability is back and the user feels in control again.

Or have I missed something important?