How far should I go with "the opposite of Fitts' Law"?

Question

After reading Jeff's blog post and being fairly new to GUI programming, I'm wondering what the limits are on applying the "opposite of Fitt's Law." For example, is it a good idea to separate "Yes" and "No" on a dialog screen, or would that conflict with another programming rule? E.g. and

Answer 1

Actually I think that the idea is to separate them enough to avoid mistakes.. So 300 pixels are too many, but at least 30 is good, 5 pixels are definetely not enough.

You should instead consider what about a cancel button, it should stay separate from YES and NO because it's conceptually different..

Answer 2

I don't believe things that are radically unrelated should even be on the same axis. Things which are related but opposing, such as Yes | No dialogs should be separated sufficiently that there is no chance of an accidental mis-click, but more importantly should follow standard conventions. In other words, don't do No | Yes, follow the convention of Yes | No | Cancel, where the rightmost buttons preserve the same state--because many people make an error by finding buttons by position rather than reading the text.

Answer 3

Make the buttons say what they user is doing "Save and Exit" and "Exit without saving", and a "Cancel and Return to Application". That removes all the ambiguity for sure, and it doesn't rely on arbitrary placement rules.