It's pretty dumb, but I never knew about "labels" while at school. I only learned about them after I left. Why didn't I use them when at school? Probably 'cause I stayed away from UI like a plague. Hey, I may have used them in my UI class, but I tried to block most of that one out.
Try out a couple of check boxes:
Without a label
To operate the first check box you have to check on that little box. To use the second all you have to do is click on the text that applies to it. A much larger target and much easier to use. And of course they are not just for check boxes, but everything (radio buttons, text fields / areas, drop downs, select boxes, ...)
This isn't just in html, but other (desktop) UI's too. Now that I know about them, I am noticing them. I can see where people have used them, and where they have not. It's cool and makes things easier to use. ;-)
People who release a UI without proper labels should be beaten with those foam fighting sticks from high-school.
ReplyDeleteBut then again, you might only expect something like that (high usability) from people who have gone through UI training, which is rarely the case..
(grumble grumble work grumble grumble grumble)
I don't know so much if it's the people who make the UI, or that there is something wrong with the *process*.
ReplyDeleteHow sad is it that there isn't widely used tools (or any??) that do simple (automated) checks in UI's that every widget has a corresponding label and throws a warning if it doesn't?
UI testing is still WAY too manual for the most part for simple things like that.
So, on that note, does anyone have experience with tools that generate usability reports for UI's? Non commercial (i.e. expensive) are better of course.
One thing that I would add: there are LOTS of apps that I use all the time that don't seem to use labels everywhere they should...
ReplyDeletesome examples would be: Outlook, MT, (GMail,) ...
And those are am sure go through mild to heavy usability testing.
I think that it's partially laziness, ignorance, and a "it doesn't really matter" attitude. But most of all I think that it's 'cause it's not super easy to find all of those. If the tools were there and used part of the build process looking for little UI stuff like that, it wouldn't be an issue because everyone would fix it just to make those little warnings go away...
I was completely unaware of labels in HTML. Thanks for the pointer. I chalk that one up to never having a proper class in web programming, and never having seen labels used in any tutorial I have ever read. It's weird how useful things like this go completely unused, because people probably don't even know they exist.
ReplyDeleteBTW, you probably stayed away from UI's like the plague, because we were using languages such as C, and Java, which make it a little difficult to build a nice UI, especailly with the short time slots given for assignments. Having an IDE which can draw out a UI makes it a lot more appealing to do this sort of thing.
ReplyDelete