Here’s a brain teaser for you: when do you put ellipsis (ellipses? I always get confused) at the end of a menu/button label? Seems simple enough: you use them when it results in some kind of prompter for more information.

But Jared Burns’ bug #205521 saying that “Reset Perspective” should be “Reset Perspective…” made me realize it wasn’t so clear.

Our own guidelines do not specify how to handle ellipsis so I took a peak at the Vista guidelines, which we look to for guidance if we’ve not established our own specific guideline. They state (my bold):

While command buttons are used for immediate actions, more information might be needed to perform the action. Indicate a command that needs additional information (including confirmation) by adding an ellipsis at the end of the
button label.

Proper use of ellipses is important to indicate that users can make further choices before performing the action, or even cancel the action entirely. The visual cue offered by an ellipsis allows users to explore your software without fear.

This doesn’t mean you should use an ellipsis whenever an action displays another window—only when additional information is required to perform the action. Consequently, any command button whose implied verb is show another window doesn’t take an ellipsis, such as with the commands About, Advanced, Help (or any other command linking to a Help topic), Options, Properties, or Settings.

Generally, ellipses are used in UI to indicate incompleteness. Commands that show other windows aren’t incomplete—they must display another window and additional information isn’t needed to perform their action. This approach eliminates screen clutter in situations where ellipses have little value.

Note the two bold parts. First, they specifically call out confirmation as deserving ellipsis. Second, the point about reducing fear of exploration is very important. Personally, I’d like my UI’s to be without fear, and a good undo seems a better solution. But I digress.

Following the guidelines, it should therefore be “Reset Perspective…”. And it should be “Preferences” (without). Simple enough.

But hang on a second, Vista itself has “Empty Recycle Bin” (no ellipsis) which prompts for confirmation. And “Delete” in the file explorer/desktop doesn’t have them, yet also confirms. Is it just a matter of them not following their own guidelines? Should our “Delete” (which confirms) have ellipsis?

Consider more “use them to tell the user not to be afraid to try the operation”. That’s a great motivation, and matches why “Reset Perspective…” is right and so is “Preferences”, since the former seems scary and mysterious, and the latter innocuous. But what about our friend “Delete”? Surely this is the scariest operation of them all! Yet neither us nor Vista use ellipsis.

Should we change it? No, because it would look silly.

Nobody is going to try “Delete” just to see what it does. We know its scary. The fact it confirms doesn’t mean I should put ellipsis as a way to encourage you to try it out (kinda evil, actually). It doesn’t add value, an important, subtle, gray issue the last line of the guideline brings up. As for “Empty Recycle Bin”, I assume the idea is the same, that you know its going to do something major so the ellipsis as an encouragement to explore would be either worthless or a bad thing.

A point of confusion is around the notion of incompleteness. I am told that if we change “Preferences” then it’ll mark the third or fourth time we’ve changed this label, back and forth adding and removing ellipsis. The pro point is that you haven’t completed the task by just opening the dialog, you need to do something in it. The con point is that its just like “Properties”, its a short form of “Open the Preferences Dialog”. I find the latter more correct and in any case don’t find it adds value because it should be pretty obvious that selecting “Preferences” won’t do anything bad.

Finally, as an exercise to the reader, consider the rules around a command whose confirmation dialog is optional, ie. the “Do not show ask me this again” type.

What all this has really brought home to me is the point that guidelines aren’t cut and dried rules. They require interpretation. Even a simple thing such as ellipsis can result in differing opinions by some pretty darn good UI people. Can we really therefore expect success out of having such things as checklists for release criteria?

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