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up vote 7 down vote favorite

It is ugly but I can't find a better place to put Move-up and Down buttons. What is your suggestion? Note: the ORDER of the items inside the spreadsheet is important to user and we save it. These buttons move up or down the items so they define the ORDER.

http://i49.tinypic.com/16m4mkj.png

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Can you rephrase this question and more explicitly describe the issue you have without requiring people view the picture? This great thing about ux.stackexchange is that future visitors can search for specific problems to find answers, but the way this is currently written doesn't really make it particularly searchable. – JonW♦ May 18 '12 at 13:15
what does these buttons do w.r.t your current UI? – sree May 18 '12 at 13:19
@sree : the ORDER of the items inside the spreadsheet is important to user and we save it. These buttons move up or down the items so they define the ORDER. – BDotA May 18 '12 at 13:22
1  
@sree - I assume that they move the currently selected row up or down. – ChrisF May 18 '12 at 13:24

2 Answers

up vote 6 down vote accepted

According to Microsoft Command Buttons: Design Guidelines you've done exactly as they expect. Possibly you could make the buttons accessible from the keyboard alt + M move up and alt + O move down.

Move up - Move down Microsoft

The only exception from this rule is when you have Add/Remove property panes as well:

Exception: Some control combinations, such as an Add/Remove layout on a property page, lack sufficient space for standard-sized Move Up/Move Down command buttons.

Property pane layout from Microsoft

Off topic tip: To get the alt + key working in Windows Forms layouts, you add a & sign in the label, making the following key the access key. The label Move Up should be labeled &Move Up to accomplish this effect.

Image of creating alt + key press

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up vote 2 down vote

Whilst I agree it isn't perfect, I don't think there is anything wrong with have your 'Move-up', 'Move-Down' buttons there - a lot of desktop applications follow a very similar pattern to the UI concerned with manipulating list-boxes.

A more aesthetically pleasing technique would be to allow your user to drag-and-drop the items within the listbox, but when dealing with winforms this would require a fair amount of GDI++ custom control programming to get it so that it was both functional and fluid.

If I were you I would move the buttons so they less floaty, and keep them inline with the top right of the control.

Something this like this is a good example to keep it neat and tidy:

Something

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