RE: [Usability] Indicating required fields

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2005-09-19 at 22:51 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Sep 2005, David Zulaica wrote:
> 
> > Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 11:57:24 -0700
> > From: David Zulaica <david pseudo-cyb org>
> > To: 'Matthew Thomas' <mpt myrealbox com>,
> >      'Usability gnome conference' <usability gnome org>
> 
> > Subject: RE: [Usability] Indicating required fields
> 
> > The required fields could have a different color border.
> 
> Subject [             ] (required)
> 
> It is ugly but it is accessible and unambiguous.
> Colour alone is not likely to be enough.
> 
> I'd be happy enough with the star like what you see on the web as it would
> meet common user expectations, principle of least astonishment.

Color alone will be problematic in the long run.  Already now,
Clearlooks puts a blue (well, selection color) border around
focused text entries.  That's really nice, and it's visually
distinguishable regardless of your color perception abilities.
And it really doesn't matter whether screen readers can see
the effect, because users of screen readers are interacting
with software in a fundamentally different way.  The focus
indicator is meaningless to them.

But now if we start using border colors for other things,
we could run into problems.  Especially if all our code is
doing is saying "make the border red".  First, there's the
problems of what colors to use.  You need to avoid using
a color that's similar to the selection color so as not to
conflict with the focus ring.  And we could quickly run
into a situation where 20 different programs are using 20
different sets of colors.  We color-blind folks would sit
back and laugh as even the rest of you got confused. ;-)

This is not to say that applying border or background
colors to text entries and other controls can't be a nice
additional affect.  But I'd far prefer things were done
in a nice semantic way.  So as a programmer, I'd call:

gtk_entry_set_is_required (entry, TRUE);

Then maybe the theme puts a border around it, or maybe
a background color.  Or maybe it sticks a little marker
inside the box, like so:

Subject: [                   * ]

And yes, of course we'd want to standardize the behavior
across themes.  We don't want to have FAQs saying "the
fields with a diamond are required", and users saying
"diamonds huh?  I see some yellow fields though."

But here's what this approach gets us:

1) If a color accent is used, it is provided by the
theme, meaning it won't conflict with the selection
color.  Unless the theme designer is dumb.

2) Visual indicators be damned.  People using screen
readers don't hear "this entry is red".  They hear
"this entry is required".

3) There is one, and only one, correct way to mark
your entries required.  And it's not a suggestion
buried away in a design document nobody reads.
It's in the API, right there in front of you.
We get consistency.

--
Shaun