[IxDA Discuss] iPhone Human Interface Guidelines

[David Gee]

On Oct 1, 2007, at 7:07 AM, Jeff Stevenson wrote:
>> You'll find a page that describes a "multiple select element". It  
>> looks like
>> a drop-down list, except I guess you can select more than one  
>> option. 
The <select multiple> element has been around since at least HTML 3.2, 
possibly longer. For as long as I can remember, it's universally been 
considered a usability nightmare - if you have any significant number of 
items checked, it's very difficult to quickly determine what is and what 
isn't selected. The default HTML implementation of the multiple select 
widget also requires Ctrl or Shift clicking to select multiple items. 
But then again...

Jeffrey D. Gimzek wrote:
> google uses this in their new - hard to believe - recipe search thing.
>
> see:
>
> <http://tinyurl.com/2ox7xw>
>
>   
I guess once Google and Apple do anything, usability concerns magically 
disappear. To be fair, Google's implementation is different - this is a 
Javascript pull-down menu cleverly disguised to look like a select 
element. It's a bit better, as they use checkboxes in place of 
ctrl/shift clicking, but there's still no at-a-glance way to see what's 
selected under that pulldown. They've done the best they could by 
setting the mouseover tooltip to show everything that's selected. Still, 
I'd never use this method for more than 10 options.

david gee