Need some advice on a toolbar on a form

  • Thread starter Thread starter William Gower
  • Start date Start date
W

William Gower

I have a toolbar on a form. It has buttons like Close, Save, Cancel, Add,
Edit, Delete etc. When the form is displayed the user can't save or cancel
anything yet. and when the use clicks on add they can save or cancel but
they can't do anything else. Should I make the buttons visible/invisible
depending on the situation or just enable/disable them? Which is more
aesthetic and least confusing on the user?
 
A good principle to follow in these cases is as follows:

If the user can only temporarily not interact with a control because of the
state of the application, enable and disable it according to the app's
state;

if the user will never be able to interact with a control during the
lifetime of the session, make it invisible.

Probably there are some special cases that are gray areas, but these two
rules work well in most cases.

Tom Dacon
Dacon Software Consulting
 
* "Tom Dacon said:
A good principle to follow in these cases is as follows:

If the user can only temporarily not interact with a control because of the
state of the application, enable and disable it according to the app's
state;

if the user will never be able to interact with a control during the
lifetime of the session, make it invisible.
Click to expand...

Full ACK. Often, people only know the position of the button and don't
actually take a closer look at the glyph or the tooltip, so hiding a
button would be more confusing.
 
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