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

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2007-05-18 at 17:16 +1200, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> On May 17, 2007, at 4:36 AM, Thorsten Wilms wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, May 16, 2007 at 09:52:15AM -0500, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > ...
> >> I'm using Clearlooks, the default theme in upstream Gnome.  When
> >> I hover over the label of a radio button or check box, the entire
> >> clickable area prelights.  As you mouse your way towards the box,
> >> you'll see the prelight and, hopefully, realize you can click.
> >
> > Prelighting offers visual indication on mouse-over, but prior to
> > that there is no visual indication.
> > ...
> 
> Exactly. To put it another way: mouseover effects are feedback you 
> don't get until just after you need it.
> 
> One thing that makes Mac OS X elegant and relaxing to use, compared 
> with Windows, Gnome, or KDE, is that its controls (apart from the Dock 
> gimmick) almost never have mouseover effects. Controls either have 
> outlines, or they don't. The "✕ - +" symbols that appear when hovering 
> over OS X's title bar buttons are the mistake that proves the rule: 
> they'd work much better if they were visible all the time.
> 
> So if anything is done to make checkbox, radiobutton, and disclosure 
> triangle labels more obviously clickable, I think it should be 
> something that is always visible.

I like to think that people, on the whole, have a good
capacity to recognize and learn patterns.  So perhaps
using a prelight hint will lead to this:

  "Oh!  I'll bet I could have clicked the label, but
  now it's too late."

But users encounter check boxes and radio buttons a lot.
So after the first few hundred times of them saying that,
I think most of them will figure it out.

On the other hand, you could put all sorts of borders and
lines around everything to make it all completely obvious.
But then all the non-beginners have to suffer the visual
noise all the time, just so that the beginners (who won't
stay beginners) can more easily learn a trick that might
make checking an option oh-so-slightly faster.

--
Shaun