Re: Singe click selection with checkboxes

[Kristoffer Lundén <kristoffer lunden gmail com>]

On 9/14/05, Christian Becke <christianbecke web de> wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, den 14.09.2005, 13:00 +0200 schrieb Kristoffer Lundén:
> > I'm personally in favour of # 2, but if someone has strong reasons why
> > not, I'm listening. :)
> 
> I would really love to see #2 implemented, but I'm afraid changing
> rubberband selections to add to a current selection will get users into
> trouble.
> Imagine a user opens a folder with a lot of items in it, so that it gets
> a scrollbar. The user then selects some items using the rubberband,
> scrolls the selected items out of the viewport and forgets about it.
> Then, he want's to make another rubberband selection and delete these
> items. Poor user didn't know that the behaviour of the selection
> changed, and instead of deleting the items he wanted to delete, he also
> deletes the previously selected items he had already forgotten about.
> So changing this behaviour must be announced VERY carefully.
>

Good use case. You are absolutely right. But I do feel this is already
the case with for instance ctrl-select, where users often start
selecting even the first file with ctrl pressed, since they are gonna
do multiple anyways. A bit further awa, perhaps but generally the same
thing.
 
> Maybe a timeout for a rubberband selection could solve this issue, but
> you had to know how long it takes the average user to forget about a
> rubberband selection he made, then.

Nah, too risky. =)

> Another solution would be to indicate visually that there is a current
> selection, e.g. by changing the mouse pointer.
> 

This I like much better. I immediately got an image in my head of a
pointer with a number attached to it, showing how many items are
selected at the moment. Not sure how obvious that is, but something
like that could be nice in either case: imagine a user who has
selected a few files, scrolling down, and then later starts to
ctrl-select more files in the normal way...

A visual hint that files are selected even though one can't see them
might be a good idea no matter what. Arrows pointing up and/or down to
more selected items out of view might be another idea.

-- 
Kristoffer Lundén
✉ kristoffer lunden gmail com
✉ kristoffer lunden gamemaker nu
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