Confusing Radio buttons (pun intended).
By default Radio has a single button, "Post," when you are done writing a blurb. That button saves your work and pushes it to your Web site.
But, sometimes, I just want to preview what I've written and not send it out to the world. There's a preference to display 3 buttons instead of just the one.
But, the buttons are "Post", "Publish", and "Post & Publish".
Huh? Bear with me, words and Human Interface are what I do for a living.
The default mode, with just one button, sets an expectation that Radio defines the word "Post" as meaning "save this and put it on my Web site."
But in the three button mode, it looks like that definition has suddenly changed. I can't say for certain because I haven't tried clicking any of these new buttons. I don't understand them, and I want to capture that confusion now before my discoveries kick in and begin to post-rationalize my interpretations.
Let's take them one at a time.
Post --- I think that this will save my work locallly, but will not upstream it to the server. It's a "save my work" button. This is different then what it meant before I turned this 3 button mode on, but it seems to be what it means in this new context. It would be private, nobody could see it be me.
Publish -- This would save my work (so I don't lose it) and upstream it to the server. Making it available to the world.
Post & Publish -- This is the one that confuses me. If I'm right about my assumptions above, then this "do both" button doesn't make sense. My blurb can't be both private and public at the same time.
OK, it's time to dive in and click the buttons. Discovery is ultimately how we learn interfaces anyway, but wording and visual clues are a large part of it. Let's see if I can figure out what's going on....
Update: I've tried all the buttons. What the wording in the interface as telling me was, as I suspected, misleading.
Here's what I think is happening....
Post saves your work but does not upstream it. This is different than what Post does in the single-button default mode. This is a Bad Thing. As in single-button mode, your edit-field is cleared so you can easily create another blurb.
Publish upstreams your work (and saves it of course) but when you click this button your current edit-field is not cleared. It's sort of like a Preview function except that it does make your work available to the whole world, which defeats the purpose of previewing something in progress. So, I don't see the value in this at all.
Post & Publish seems completely redundant because it both upstreams your work and keeps the current text in the edit-field. I don't see any difference between this button and the Publish button.
Perhaps I'm totally wrong here.
But this is based on what I'm experiencing, my careful observations using the UI and visual clues provided by the software, learned behavior taught by 24 hours of using Radio Userland, and my own expectations based on the wording being used and my 37 years of experience with the English language.
Oh, and yes, I checked the Help. It tells me I can switch between one and three button mode, but doesn't tell me what each button does. Nor is it task-based (which would be better).
More on this later. I'm going to try to determine if my assumptions are correct, then offer a solution to these problems.
8:49:58 AM 
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