A colleague of mine was in a bit of a predicament earlier and asked for my opinion on mental models. He is currently in the process of designing screens for our project and wanted to know whether he should a) go with his belief that positive action button should be on the right and the negative/neutral on the left (like Apple's dialogs) or b) follow the Windows convention of positive on the left and negative on the right (ok and cancel buttons).
Like many of us he has a fundamental belief that the Windows model is wrong. As much as I wanted to advise to use the 'correct' approach the problem with this is that the majority of users are Windows users and yes people can unlearn and re-train but when we are dealing with a client who may be adverse to such matters it is best to provide them with a screen that depicts *their* mental model as opposed to the correct mental model.
The best approach by far, in this matter would be to mock up both versions and get them to pick so that the onus and ownership belongs to them rather than us. However, this may not be possible with the time constraints. The impression that he has given me is that he is likely to bit the bullet on this particular issue and go with the Windows approach!
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