Re: [Usability] Options, Check, Toggle, Exclusive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On May 12, 2007, at 8:32 AM, Thorsten Wilms wrote:
> ...
> http://thorwil.wordpress.com/2007/05/11/options/
>
> Does anyone here have some insight why toggle buttons look like
> command buttons?

Because GTK+ theme developers never got around to making them look 
different? :-)

Another reason may be that toggle buttons are usually used in toolbars, 
where space is too cramped to use actual checkboxes, radio buttons, or 
command buttons. In Windows 95 and Windows 98 (without Internet 
Explorer 4 installed), toolbar buttons looked identical to command 
buttons, so that may have inspired early GTK+ themes. (Internet 
Explorer 4, followed by Netscape 4, Office 97, and Windows 2000, 
introduced the horrid border-on-mouseover toolbar buttons now found in 
most GTK+ themes.)

I wonder if it would be useful to give toggle buttons a shape analogous 
to the controls they represent. Boolean toggle buttons could be 
rectangular [___][___][___], because checkboxes are square. And groups 
of radio toggle buttons could have the first and last rounded 
(___|___|___), because radio buttons are rounded.

> And why check and radio buttons look like they do on many platforms?
> ...

I speculated about this in <http://urlx.org/lists.whatwg.org/0d1e4>: 
"[N]ative checkbox and radiobutton labels are clickable but don't look 
like it. My guess is that their clickability was added as a quick hack 
in the early 1980s, once testing revealed that the checkboxes and 
radiobuttons themselves were uncomfortably small target areas. The 
designers should have established a different appearance to advertise 
this different behavior, but they didn't. Perhaps they could have used 
a contiguous groove or ridge underlining both the checkmark/dot and the 
label, with no separate border around the checkmark/dot artificially 
belittling the target area. The next time Microsoft or Apple or 
Trolltech or Symbian or the GTK+ developers alter their toolkit's 
default appearance, that is something they could experiment with."

And now you're experimenting with it. :-) I think you've found that 
giving checkboxes and radio buttons complete borders would be too 
cluttered, and that trying to lighten those borders would make the 
controls look insensitive.

The opposite of my groove/ridge suggestion would be what MT-NewsWatcher 
does, which is to make toggle buttons look like actual checkboxes even 
when they're in a toolbar. <http://urlx.org/cit.cornell.edu/f75a1> That 
looks kinda silly, though. (I dearly wish e-mail clients would copy the 
buttons themselves, as they would prevent many of the errors where 
people reply to mailing lists instead of individuals and vice versa ... 
But that's another story.)

Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/