Style guide vs. GUI terminology?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Kim McCarter reports: <<Our department style guide states the following:
When instructing the user to perform some action on the user interface, use
the term "Select" rather than "Click," "Choose," or "Press."  Use "Click"
only when the user must Right-click, to specify such. The only time Press is
used is when the user must interact with the keyboard, as in "Press
Enter.">>

I'd agree with you about "press", which is best reserved for the keyboard
and which conforms with both standard industry and standard English usage,
but suspect that the rest of your choices contradict both prevailing
industry usage and prevailing English usage. (Based on what I see in the
docs I read daily.)

Selecting something just means that you've picked it from among the other
choices. It does not mean that you've actually done anything with the
selection, and that's why this term is usually restricted to checkboxes and
radio buttons; after you select them, you then need to do something else
(click the OK button, for instance). This usage is inconsistent with the use
of "select" for menu options, and some prefer using "choose" for menu items
to avoid that inconsistency. Personally, I consider this one of those
inconsistencies that is more apparent to us editors than to typical computer
users.

"Clicking" has generally come to mean pressing the mouse button, so when you
position the mouse cursor above a screen button and click the mouse, you're
(by extension) clicking that screen button. Because users may occasionally
need to use the righthand mouse button, you need a different term for that,
and that's where "right-click on X" comes in. There's some logic to the
suggestion that a few users rewire their mice to switch the left and right
buttons, and thus, that "right click" isn't the best term, but my take on
this is that anyone smart enough to rewire the mouse will know they've done
so and will know what to do when they see the instruction "right click".

<<all of our legacy documentation uses Select>>

This makes the problem considerably dicier, since your users may have begun
to memorize a usage pattern that differs from the rest of the documentation
they read. My overall feeling is that you'll be doing them a favor if you
gradually update your legacy documentation to follow industry standards
rather than forcing them to learn inconsistent terminology.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada 

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