Close button on preferences dialog is on the wrong side on macos

Hey viswiz, @balupton, and rctneil, thanks for the feedback here! This is an area we're continuing to look into on the design team and I appreciate hearing back from folks on it. The main consideration we took when creating our modal views was keeping them as simple as possible and making them easy to understand and use. We've done user testing with them a few times now, and while they tested extremely well in general, we have already made some changes based on that and other feedback and I'll make sure we continue to do that and iterate based on those types of tests as well as hearing back from folks like you.

The current versions do indeed break from Apple's general modal guidelines (although Apple themselves break that on occasion as well) and there are a lot of pros to going with system conventions. It can help with familiarity for those that have interacted with similar controls in other places as you've pointed out. There is also a balance that we try to work through in regards to whether or not breaking from the conventions hurts, or helps usability. And of course "usability" varies from person to person depending on their own experiences and familiarity with conventions, so we try to user test and research across different backgrounds. And in addition to that there is also a balancing act with how the implementation would work from a time, effort, and upkeep standpoint on the development side of things for us (and prioritizing things with other projects we are working on). It's a constant effort that we try to go through to look through all of those things and see where we can work to improve things next.

All of that is a very longwinded way of me saying, I completely see where you're coming from and appreciate your thoughts here being a long, long time Mac user myself. And I'll keep on pushing us to consider all of this when we make our decisions for the apps, hearing from you does have an impact and we work to keep track of this type of feedback over time as well. Our goal here is always to make the absolute best, and most usable apps we can. ❤️

Cheers,

Dan Peterson
Staff Designer @ 1Password