Wednesday 1 March 2006 — This is over 18 years old. Be careful.
Checkboxes are a difficult UI element to use properly. The problem is they are asking a yes/no question, but you can only see one of the choices. This morning I got a perfect example.
My son Max is trying to write an installer for a Windows program (sniff, they grow up so fast!). I pointed him at Inno Setup because I had used it in the past and found it to be straightforward, and it comes with a helpful wizard. He came back and said, “That wizard is no good, it just makes an empty install file!”
I tried the wizard, and saw the problem. At the bottom of the first page is a checkbox labeled,
Create a new empty script file.
Max had checked it, because he thought it meant, “I want to make a new installer.” If instead, there had been two radio buttons labeled,
- I want to start with an empty install script and fill it in myself
- I want the wizard to ask questions, and create a finished script for me
he would have made the proper choice. He didn’t know what the alternative to the checkbox was. The key word in the checkbox was “empty”, but Max interpreted it as “new”, or maybe even “script file”. Explicitly listing the two alternatives makes the choice very clear.
BTW: This is the UI equivalent of Booleans suck.
Comments
For instance, this very window asks me an URL to leave my comment. The field is labeled with "www" which is misleading to me because I don't know if I have to enter only a domain and you will append "www" or if I have to enter the full URL.
See the UI widget is not in fault but your label is ;)
Anytime you post something mentioning a programming project with your son, I get anxious. My own is to be born in two or three months now, and although things like that are a long way off still, I just wonder if I'll be able to have a fun saturday debugging with my son or if he'll turn out completely unlike me (what if he's a jock?!) and I just won't get it. Still, those Madlibs stories are what got me reading your site so often.
That's more profound than it seems at first blush. This isn't the first passing mention of seen of the son following in the father's footsteps. It seems to me we're just now seeing the first ever large scale "next generation" of programmers. I think there's some interesting ramifications to that.
In this form, on Safari, I can't tab to the 'Email me future comments' checkbox. :-)
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