Back in January i asked whether to use checkboxes in a list or not. While many desktop applications do not use checkboxes to select items many web-applications do. And now even one more to: after my previous post Yahoo! mail decided to change their list implementation to include checkboxes. (If they only would remove all those annoying ads more people would actually use it as well). I assume this is either because users complained about this in the beta testing or the usability experts at Yahoo! overruled the initial decisions made by the developers. Or; probably both.
Ryan Mitton nails it in his comment on my previous post:
<blockquote>in my opinion as a user, drop down menus and anything that ‘has to open’ leads me to the perception of cumbersome. if more checkboxes or simple ‘one click’ selections were made (as opposed to the ‘two click’ of dropping the menus, then choosing selection….the software would ‘feel’ less cumbersome. quick quick quick is the mantra of everything!</blockquote>
We have decided to change our UI guidelines to always include checkboxes in listviews. In fact we will support both checkboxes and normal ctrl/shift-click selection. So this is one small step for 24SevenOffice and one big step towards to ease of use for our users :)
Oh, and checkboxes is obviously not a word according to Blogger’s spellcheck.. ;)
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