Re: FW: RE: Have you seen this GUI element?

["S. R. Begnoche" <begnoche -at- mindspring -dot- com>]

At 05:48 PM 2/25/00 -0800, Letha Dunn-Ballinger wrote:
>(though it hasn't made it into the Office suite that I know of). The most
>recent app I saw it in was VB, and then there's Defect Control System or DCS
>Tracker, I can't remember which.
>
>I laughed when I saw this thread because at one company where I worked a
>handful of people in the QA department threatened to quit if we didn't
>replace the ellipsis browse with the more traditonal "Browse..." button.
>Even though it did great in formal usability testing they insisted it would
>be a problem for users. A very passionate issue! Well, it's nice that they
>cared. :-)

I agree with your QA colleagues! I documented a database management app
developed in VB that used the infamous [...] button. Operationally, it
takes longer to select a list item by this means, and users never knew the
meaning of [...] intuitively. In fact, depending on their screen
resolution, sometimes they literally could barely see the three little dots
on the button. 

In addition to its general unfriendliness, the button was dastardly to
document properly because, in my situation, I couldn't refer to it as the
"Browse" button--there was another button in the same app that was actually
labeled with the word "Browse" for file and path searches. I complained
about [...] a great deal, but by the time I moved on from that job, the
software developers had decided to migrate *all* drop-down lists to the
[...] button! 

Suzanne Begnoche
Training Developer
IBM PC Institute
Research Triangle Park, NC