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Controls tables - REDUX
Bringing this up again. There are discussions all over the place about it. But Skizzerz has put together a mockup here. Lets pick one and update the guide. Personally, I prefer the first or the last ones. -- Prod (talk) 02:16, 25 December 2012 (UTC)


 * I personally like the last one the best (Action column on left, with right-aligned text). For a left-to-right language, we start reading from the left hand side of the page/screen. Therefore, let us consider what I think would be the most common use case for a controls page -- trying to find a control to do a particular thing because you don't know/forgot it. I don't have any sort of hard evidence that this is the most common use case for a controls page/listing, but I can't really think of any other use cases. For that particular use case, you are first searching for what you are trying to accomplish, and then how to accomplish it. When reading left-to-right, then, you would like the first thing in each row you read to be the what so you then can make a decision on whether or not to continue reading that row more quickly than if you had to first scan to the end of the row to determine the what and then look backwards on the same row for the how. So by having the Action column as the leftmost column, it requires less work to find information by what first and how second, and thus is faster. As for left-aligned vs right-aligned, I prefer right-aligned because it leads more into the table itself and is just more aesthetically pleasing (I could go into another not-researched usability talk of the benefits of right-aligned vs left-aligned for the first column based on personal experience/opinion, but this is already getting pretty lengthy). -- 04:02, 25 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Since most games have a tutorial or controls list available, I think control references are definitely to a) refresh peoples memories and b) to note controls (such as button combos) that may have been excluded from the in-game list/tutorial. As for left or right, we've always put our controls on the left. This is the natural way - most new people start control pages that way. It's because we think/say it in a syntax like "this button/combination does this". We don't think/say it like "this action requires this button/combination". I don't think we need to switch our standard. It is equally as efficient and logical. I wouldn't mind the change - if you guys want to do it and bot all of the pages into the switch that'd be fine. Note that at the end of this discussion we need to update Guide/Getting Started pages. -- 19:52, 27 December 2012 (UTC)