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France Baril wonders: <<Let's say you have side by side list boxes. The
left box shows available items, the right one shows the selected items.
There are two buttonsbetween these boxes. The top button says Add, the
bottom one says Remove. When you select item from the left box of
available item and click Add. The selected items appears in the right
box. Would you expect the items to be removed from the left box when
they appear in the right one? >>
I wouldn't "expect" it, since incompetent or user-hostile GUI design
remains an unpleasant fact of life. But I would _greatly appreciate_
this behavior.
<<My feeling is that they should, yet I can't prove it to my team and
they can't prove me otherwise. Can anyone point me to a website that
provides guidelines for using side by side list boxes?>>
Neither design is inherently wrong. The "move items from one list to
the other" approach is the most common. Think of it this way: express
the task from the user's standpoint. There are two metaphors you can
use:
- The bookshelf or toolbox approach: "I want to select something off
the shelf/out of the box and move it onto the table". If there is no
need to select something twice, or if doing so would be actively
incorrect, this is an effective metaphor. Removing an item from a list
after it's been chosen reduces the burden on the user when they make
the next choice: they no longer have to ignore this item as they
examine the others.
- The buffet approach: "I want to take some of this stuff for my plate,
but leave the rest for the next person". If you can or must obtain
multiple copies of something, then you obviously can't remove it from
the list of options after you've selected it once.
Which metaphor makes more sense in your case? Another selling point: If
they leave the original item in the list, the developers must program a
whole set of code to indicate what has already been selected so as to
prevent the user from selecting it again. Is this easier to program and
more robust than removing a selected item from the displayed list? If
not, suggest that the easier and more elegant solution works best for
them.
--Geoff Hart ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
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