[davidverhasselt]

I'm missing a good reason why the distinction needs to be made visually clear. More about this at the end.

I think a lot of this design thinking is stuck in the past, and we should be able to challenge and throw off some of the shackles or crutches that made sense back then, but might not anymore today, in order to advance and give priority to different goals.

In this specific case, it should be clear that you can select multiple options from context or by text, or it should be encouraged to try it out (i.e. easy to undo). If you need to rely on the visual difference of the icon, then you've already lost more than 50% of the people who don't realise this.

My thesis is that this visual difference is only useful to a select, minority group of people who have an above average level of interest in software, who would even be aware of it. Yes, they were probably the target market decades ago, but nowadays software caters to a wider group than that, and I wonder if you would survey a group of "normies" how many would actually rely on the visual distinction in any way (even just supportive).

I'm late 30s and I remember being confused about the difference between "radio buttons" and "checkboxes" when trying to learn HTML4 when I was young - even the name "radio button" was back then already only something older folks would be able to understand, why it's called that way. The distinction, even conceptually, was more confusing than helpful. It's really just a property of a list of checkboxes, how many you can select, not an entirely different class of UI component.

To continue on from my first sentence, and conclude my argument, this whole article does not contain a single good reason why that visual distinction is important in 2024. The closest I could find, is this line which implies confusion: "There was a brief confusion up until 1986 when Apple used rounded rectangles instead of circles". Just the fact that the article has to describe the difference and show visual examples, tells me that this is just no longer a concept that's important, as it may have been 30 years ago, from when it originated.

Instead, it only makes references to "tradition", "convention", "internal training", or arguments from authority such as "art director says so".

I think that kind of supports my point - in the context of UI of 2024, the only reason that one would keep the distinction visually is for tradition, not for any actual practical reason anymore, or the practical benefits that may still be there have diminished in value so that they don't outweigh the downsides or extra constraint anymore.

[mixmastamyk]

If you have to “try it out” to understand the interface for each program you’re wasting everyone’s time. No loss in giving clues to those who understand either.

There’s a real productivity benefit to learning and using standardized interfaces. The rest of your post reads like an appeal to “closed mindset” theory.

[davidverhasselt]

You've missed the point of my comment entirely and pulled two items out of context.

[wruza]

You seem to ignore the fact that people ignore ux advices. You can ask them politely, but they'll still slap something together and call it a day. And there's no way a complex control that you described can get into popular ui libs. Or to be approved by all "designers". These default looks of type="radio" and type="checkbox" are the last stand. If you break it, you'll complain even more but nobody would listen still. Cause defaults and easy ways rule the world. Accessibility is a rough battle already even without ideas that definitely won't work.

[mixmastamyk]

I disagree with every paragraph. Too long to address every line.

If you had better points than, it doesn’t matter, idea is “old”, and/or people can’t learn, well you made them poorly.

[simion314]

>It's really just a property of a list of checkboxes, how many you can select, not an entirely different class of UI component.

Not really at all. Radio buttons are part of a group so 3 radio buttons are related and exclusive, there 3 check-boxes represent 3 different unrelated things. The typical example is selecting your gender/sex , you use a radio btn group and put 2 radio buttons or if you are less competent dev you recreate this with checkboxes, scripting and extra validation.

[sfink]

> In this specific case, it should be clear that you can select multiple options from context or by text, or it should be encouraged to try it out (i.e. easy to undo).

It seems like you're saying that because there isn't anything inherent in the visual difference, it is better to remove the difference entirely and force everyone through a less efficient mechanism with higher cognitive overhead.

> If you need to rely on the visual difference of the icon, then you've already lost more than 50% of the people who don't realise this.

Agreed, but how does having a visual difference mean forcing people to rely on it? The visual difference is purely an augmentation, and one that kicks in early enough that it prevents people from forming an incorrect mental model. At least for some percentage of people—you're saying 50% here, I would hazard at least 95% (of people at least a little familiar with using graphical interfaces). And the remaining 5% aren't being left out in the cold, they can always experiment.

> It's really just a property of a list of checkboxes, how many you can select, not an entirely different class of UI component.

I completely disagree, and in fact I think this is probably the fundamental error. You are talking from an implementation point of view. From the point of view of a user, they are being asked to input very different things. They are picking from a set of options, or they are accepting/rejecting each item in a list of things. It includes a distinction between one and multiple, and I hope you don't think those are handled the same way in our brains. ("Sorry, dear, I thought she was one of my wives.... oh, right! You're the only one I have! I guess I forgot again.") The fact that they can both have a superficial manifestation as a list of options makes it more important, not less, to visually distinguish them. Radio buttons have more in common with a single-selection dropdown than they do with a list of checkboxes.