unity-design team mailing list archive

[Philipp Wendler <ubuntu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

Am 04.07.2012 18:21, schrieb Matthew Paul Thomas:
> Thorsten Wilms wrote on 07/06/12 11:59:

>> If all you have to communicate is On/Off, what is wrong with
>> checkboxes? They do have unclear target areas (in proper
>> implementations, the label is clickable, too), but are well
>> established and do not suffer from the problems switches have, as
>> listed above.
> 
> Good question.
> 
> For some kinds of boolean setting, a checkbox feels too feeble to
> control it -- it leaves you unsure whether it is actually turned on or
> off right now. In the past, a pair of radio buttons, "On" and "Off",
> was sometimes used to solve this. A switch control does the same job,
> in a more compact and reassuring way.

Really?
Personally I absolutely feel the opposite.
For a check box it is totally clear, whether it is on or off:
Check mark is there -> on; check mark is missing -> on.
Everybody knows this, because even paper forms follow the same principle
(empty box vs. filled box), and radio buttons do so, too.

On the other side, I've always found switches totally confusing since
they have appeared in GUIs, and I'm still unsure about their state
everytime I see one.
I never know whether the word written on it tells me the current state,
or the state that would be activated if I click it. I do confuse this
because a switch looks much more like a button than a plain text label,
and buttons are always labeled with their action, whereas labels are
used to show state to the user.
So why is this principle suddenly inverted for switches?
If I use the mouse to drag the switch, it becomes worse: I have to drag
the switch into the direction of the word "Off" in order to turn it on!
This is the complete opposite of how (labeled) switches work in real life.

The only thing saving me with the current Ubuntu switches is their color
change. As soon as I see the highlighted color in one of their states, I
know this is the "on" state, and the other has to be the "off" state.
But if the switch is "off" when I see it, there is no indication that it
would change color, and so there is no indication that it is actually off.

In the end, I always try the switches out to find out in which state
they are. For check boxes, I did this exactly once at the first time I
sat in front of a computer, and I never had to learn this again after
theme-changes, OS changes, or for new GUI toolkits.

> Most boolean options either don't need that level of solidity, or
> can't be labelled briefly enough for a switch, or both. They should
> continue using checkboxes/checkmarks, or a pair of radio buttons/radio
> items. "Show Time in Menu Bar", "Record file and application usage",
> "In the clock, show: [/] Date and month", and so on.

Then why use switches at all?
If a checkbox is a good representation for most boolean options, why not
for all?
Why irritate the user with different input methods for the same type of
question?
For example in the "Brightness and Lock" settings page, there are a
switch and a checkbox almost directly next to each other.
What's the advantage of this for the user?


I would really like to have switches abolished completely again. Please
do not follow Apple's path blindly and use switches just because they
are now cool.
Although I don't have numbers, I am pretty sure that checkboxes would be
at least as good for the users, if not even better (for me they would be!).

If you think the problem is their small target size, their size could
probably be adjusted to be as large as that of a switch (at least in
height).

Greetings, Philipp