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

["Amaury Chamayou" <achamayou gmail com>]

On 5/14/07, Thorsten Wilms <t_w_ freenet de> wrote:

Interesting you would think of speed not being part of usability.

Well, I was thinking "obvious and easy to use" here, not "faster". The top speed is the same as I mentionned earlier (since you can always click straight on your choice.

It's about avoiding bad habbits. If one ever gets used to one way to
operate something, it takes effort to switch to another way.

Compare:

Position cursor over desired option, click
vs
Position cursor over current option, press and hold mouse button, move
cursor to desired option, release mouse button

You are probably right on this. I'm not much of an expert, I just thought it would be interesting to make the exclusivity of the choice obvious. It's not entirely clear with current radio buttons ( ie "why can't i have multiple black dots in those small holes") and if they are not positionned corretly (for example sometimes they are in two rows), you might click on something that will actually deactivate an option you have selected earlier because they are exclusive. It would be less of a surprise if there was a slide, a kind of movement from the place where something was deactivated to the place you have chosen.
Maybe there is a way to express this, and still not trigger bad habits for the users ?

Amaury