Robby on Rails

As a user of many web applications, I often find myself noticing little things that slow me down. One such thing is the use of checkboxes in web forms. It’s not the problem of checkboxes itself, it’s the face that checkboxes require the user to really focus their attention to a fairly small box on the page and perform a click inside. If you’re filling out a form really quickly, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll take advantage of you your tab key to get through each field quickly. Sometimes there are select boxes, which require the user to make selections with their mouse. Checkboxes drive me crazy because it requires more time to position the cursor and move on.

So, when I see a form like this, I don’t see it being very quick to interact with.

While I’m not in love with the date selection interface here, my bigger pain has been the checkbox in the form. Why? Because they forgot to use the <label for=""> HTML tag.

What’s the problem? Well, I don’t have the convenience of clicking on the label text, which would toggle the corresponding checkbox.

I know, many of you know all about this… but I run into this problem everywhere. This is an accessibility issue for people and really just increases the chances for a frustrating user experience. When you use the label tag properly… it will provide a larger amount of the screen for people to click, which reduces the chance of not clicking in the right spot. The label tag was designed with this in mind so that people could click close enough to trigger the desired action.

Here is an example of where it becomes really useful.

So, the lesson? Please remember to use the label for tag. :-)

<input type="checkbox" id="remember_me" name="remember_me" value="true" />
<label for="remember_me">Remember info?</label>  

This is an easy thing to forget when building web applications. We’ve forgot and I’m sure you have too. I just wanted to point it out though because I see this happen so much… even in new sites.

Perhaps you run into similar problems with web applications that can be fixed with just a little more HTML. Care to share your experiences?

For more information, read Labeling form elements from the Dive Into Accessibility site.

There was a post the other day on Signal vs Noise about the pain of opting out of mailing lists titled, Redonkulous unsubscribe delays, which I was reminded of after the following experience.

Earlier today, I got an email notification from my old Friendster account, which ended up being spam. I hadn’t logged into the account in ages and looked around at my profile and others. No meaningful interaction between my friends in a few years. It’s felt like a ghost town. So, I thought… “should I just delete my account?” I was thinking about doing the same thing with my Facebook account as well, because I’m getting tired of being invited to applications a few times a day due to a friend leaving my name checked when they sign up for a game. (this is getting old…)

So, I decided to kill the Friendster account, which I’ve had since February 2003. Oh… the good ole days of social-networking sites.

Upon filling out a form I got the following error with the notification, “Please list the other social networking site you switched to.”

The tone of this error message is very rude and helped support my decision to leave the site.

While I appreciate that they’re looking for feedback, they shouldn’t demand it out of me. As a result, my response was…

Wait a minute. You’re demanding that I list the sites that I’m switching to… in 20 characters or less? Thanks for giving me the opportunity to LOLBUG you. Sigh. Who makes these interaction decisions there?

If they really wanted to get some useful feedback, perhaps they could have asked me nicer.

So, I decided to head over to Facebook and compare their process.

At first glance, this looks very much like the form that I was presented with on Friendster. Except that I can only select one reason why I am leaving and I can think of a few. However, when I made a selection… something surprised me.

Okay, so maybe I’ll leave my Facebook account around for the time being. Perhaps there is a Facebook application out there that will be get my attention.. but to date, this has yet to happen.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Robby Russell’s Friendster Profile. Feb. 2003 – Dec. 2007. R.I.P.