forms - OK/Cancel on left/right?

Should OK button be on left of Cancel button or vice versa?

Are there any studies suggesting either of the solutions?

Answer

As with everything: user test! Thankfully, usability hero Jakob Nielsen jumps to the rescue here in his Alertbox article about OK/Cancel buttons:

Should the OK button come before or after the Cancel button? Following platform conventions is more important than suboptimizing an individual dialog box.

Kostya was right on the mark in advising adherence to platform guidelines. But what about web-based platforms?

If you're designing a Web-based application, the decision is harder, but you should probably go with the platform preferred by most of your users. Your server logs will show you the percentage of Windows vs. Mac users for your specific website or intranet. Of course, Windows generally has many more users, so if you can't be bothered to check the logs, then the guideline that will apply to most situations is OK first, Cancel last.

He also mentions two additional important guidelines you might consider when creating OK/Cancel buttons:

• It's often better to name a button to explain what it does than to use a generic label (like "OK"). An explicit label serves as "just-in-time help," giving users more confidence in selecting the correct action.


• Make the most commonly selected button the default and highlight it (except if its action is particularly dangerous; in those cases, you want users to explicitly select the button rather than accidentally activating it by hitting Enter).