I sometimes use StarOffice on JDS. JDS has various rough edges which sometimes make me feel frustrated.
Today, I realized that one of those rough edges is that the buttons in some StarOffice dialogs are in a different order than the ones in most other apps on JDS. Consider these two dialogs:
The primary button (OK) of the StarOffice Character dialog is on the left of the dialog, while the primary button (Save) in the gedit alert is on the right side of the window.
Certainly not everything in the GNOME world is consistent with the GNOME UI Guidelines, so you could certainly argue that this is not an important detail given the other rough edges in the environment.
While this detail (for me at least) is not something I'm usually consciously aware of when using the product, my unconscious does seem to notice this. My unconscious whispers to me "I'm not sure why, but I seem to have to work too hard in this environment." I think this gives a real (though hard to quantify) sense of poor product quality.
Notice that in another reasonably popular environment where the buttons are in the opposite order of JDS, this button order seems OK:
Here, the StarOffice Character dialog has its buttons in the same order as the earlier one, while the message box from a text editor has buttons in the same order as the Character one.
I'm not part of the OpenOffice team, but I would guess that they decided: "We want OpenOffice users to have a consistent experience on all platforms. So, make the buttons the same on all platforms." This makes sense. If you were using OpenOffice in three different environments on your desk, you might indeed get frustrated if the buttons were in different orders in the different environments.
So, this brings us to a design question: if you were designing OpenOffice, which way would you put the buttons?
Personally, I would put them in the order of the environment (GNOME order on GNOME, the other order in some other environment). But, I think this is precisely the reaction that, as a designer, I must ignore. This is because s a user of the product, my opinion should not be weighted more heavily than any other single user of the product. I think that as a member of the product team, I would be obligated to set aside my personal opinion and ask: who is the product being created for, and what do they need?
That's an easy question to ask, but it is surprisingly hard to get the emotional distance from your own concerns in order to professionally answer it. In fact, perhaps OpenOffice is targeted primarily at users that simultaneously run the suite on multiple platforms. So the right answer may be to do exactly what it is doing, regardless of my own personal preference. When I watch some discussion groups on the net, it seems clear that some people don't understand the importance of ignoring themselves when doing design.
Of course, another design choice might be to provide an option that would allow the user to control the order. Yet, this also demonstrates another fact about how people use software: Users don't change defaults. It is, inexplicably, easier to write a long blog entry about something than it is to open up some settings window and determine if there is such a setting! Maybe I'll go look now. 