Labeling Buttons
Let's get one thing out of the way really fast. I love Textpattern. It's fantastic. However, it happens to break one of my personal little problems with labeling buttons.
When writing new entries, even if you select for the entry to be a draft or pending, the button still reads “Publish”. This isn’t a glaring hole, and I can see past it. However, anytime I have a thought, I drop it in Textpattern as a draft and save it for later refining. That way I always have a repository of ideas to just pick up and write about, but when the button says publish, no matter how many times I do it, I still hesitate and have to double check that I’m saving it as pending.
Not being one to offer criticism without suggestions, I mocked up the following to show what it could look like so that it would be easier to tell what the status was when you save your entry. By moving the statuses closer to the save button, it’s much more natural to know exactly what I’m doing.
Naturally, it’s never that simple. Texpattern uses different text for that save button depending on whether or not it’s the first time it’s been published or whether it’s being updated after it’s live. I really like this idea because it lets me know if I’m creating a new entry instead of editing an old entry. It sounds silly, but the way I work with Textpattern, it’s very easy for me to make this mistake and overwrite an entry accidentally.
So now, instead of “Publish” which implies that the entry will show up on the site, the button says “Create” which tells me that it is a brand new entry that has never existed in the system before.
Summary
It’s a very minor and subtle change, but it’s a good example of being careful when labeling buttons. Different words can have very subtle implications that could cause confusion or hesitation. Usability is about making sure that your application does what your users expect it to do. When your button tells them exactly what’s going on, it helps set that expectation clearly and succinctly.
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Interesting. I am using Textpattern and never really thought of it that way. But it is so true.
Perhaps you should switch to Typo. When saving new material the button says "Save this Article" (and there is a checkbox to publish or not), then when your editing an existing article it the button says "Store" instead of "Save this article".
Conceptually you usually save something as a draft. Publishing is really a completely different task and, in my experience, should be called out as such. That way you stick to a document-based user pattern that people are fairly accustomed to with traditional software authoring tools. You have a bunch of different document types that have a status (draft/published/archived/etc.)
why not to go a step further and have button label changed depdending on current radio button selection: "Save draft","Publish hidden" etc.
why not just have 4 seperate buttons that say what they mean?
"Pending" is a ridiculous label. Pending what? Usually something's status is set as pending when you start it through a workflow of some kind (pending approval, pending review, etc.). Really you only need two controls --> save and publish. Then a way to control status where you have settings for visibility, etc.
I think the point is nice but example is not that clear - publish could mean publish into hidden section of a site which makes sense to me.