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by fiddlerwoaroof 948 days ago
Yeah, shift/control-click is a longstanding workflow for multiselect and macOS, Linux and windows all support it with various platform-specific subtleties. The worst part of the web is losing all these sorts of features because some web designer thinks they’re a “bad UX”
2 comments
DangitBobby 948 days ago
Present a form with a 25 item native multiselect to 10 of your non-prgrammer family members. Ask them to perform two tasks:

- Select 5 non-adjacent items

- Select 5 adjacent items.

Report back with success rates.

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fiddlerwoaroof 948 days ago
The nice thing about native behaviors is you only have to teach them once. Custom behaviors per application make it harder for people to develop a model of how their computer works because you have to learn a new interaction model per application. I’m pretty anti the notion that UX is intuitive in any sense: all human-computer interaction is learned at some point and we should focus more on educating people how to do tasks like this than pursuing some lowest-common denominator concept of “intuitiveness” or “discoverability”.

Anyways, my favorite multiselect paradigm is the old windows one with two list boxes side by side and buttons in between.

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DangitBobby 947 days ago
Django has a version of that widget in the admin panel and I really like it.

I actually like native web multi-select widget because I know how it works and it works well. But most people don't know how it works, no one is going to teach them, and they aren't going to look it up (they probably don't even know what to search for to learn!). So you need one that works just with clicks and no modifier keys or most people won't actually be able to use it. In other words, it's not accessible.

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LeonB 947 days ago
That two-window approach was particular useful where you needed to be able to rearrange the order of the items.

Now we tend to have a part of the record appearing to have texture (stripes or bumps) as a clue that grabbing it will afford pushing it up or down.

There’s many little common standards like that which have never appeared in “out of the box” controls provided by the platforms.

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docmars 948 days ago
Why not do both? Gmail's a great example of this. Hold shift while clicking two checkboxes in a range of emails, and watch as the entire range is selected for you to manage. :)
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