Saturday, April 7, 2012

Why cancel-button now also first on Android?

Just wondering about this big time...

Why is Android switching the standard buttons order for Android 4.0 and higher? See for example this screenshot, the cancel button is now the first button!
I was always taught that what the user most likely wants to do should be first, and so the dismissive button last.
And Cancel is usually not what to user wants to do!

Apple is doing it also in their iOS, is Android now just plainly copying it?
Definitely prefer Cancel at the end, (western) reading occurs from left to right, so now one always has to read/skip the dismissive button!

From the expert the conclusion is just to be consistent. That means at least within the Android platform it is not consistent between pre 4.0 and 4.0+... I think an unneeded and unnecessary change.

2 comments:

Andrew Stirling said...

I can practically guarantee that this is because of the different method of interacting than most interfaces - specifically, most people hold their phone in their left hand, and then use their right to interact with it. This means that anything on the right is easier to touch than anything on the left.

I think you can expect this (putting important buttons and such on the right) to become more and more common with touch devices.

Techie said...

Quite a good point! Though the lefties are left out in the cold...