Should toggle button show its current state or the state to which it'll change?

Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by sponaugle on Monday February 12, 2024 @11:24AM (#39346720)

I have some old NASA push button switches that have two bulbs in them. When the switch is off both lights are off, when you click the switch the yellow bulb comes on and lights up the switch, and when the device you turned on actually turns on a green light turns on ( and the yellow turns off ). The idea is you push the button and the yellow state is the confirmation that you toggled the switch, but the green is the confirmation that the action you wanted occurred. Kind of an interesting 'state feedback' mechanism.

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by kqr on Monday February 12, 2024 @11:33AM (#39346860)

This is a good one, and also what airplanes do[1]. These problems are solved by people who care a lot about usability, but computer people are slow to pick up this sort of stuff from other fields.

Labels outside the switch also work.[2]

[1]: https://my737ng.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/cp_mcp_header...

[2]: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2c/37/0a/2c370a3f4018cfa9c3ef...

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by pjot on Monday February 12, 2024 @01:43PM (#39348631)

My table saw has this as well. A green and red light, both with off/steady/blink states that indicates information about the blade and safety system.

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by bqmjjx0kac on Monday February 12, 2024 @02:53PM (#39349531)

Mine has this as well! I like the UX, but it's also kind of crazy that they didn't think about red/green colorblind users.

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by kqr on Monday February 12, 2024 @03:34PM (#39350096)

Are they incandescent or LED? Until recently red and green were the only LEDs possible and some industries move slowly on such things.

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by thr33 on Monday February 12, 2024 @05:52PM (#39351658)

colorblindness would have no effect on this ux pattern

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by bqmjjx0kac on Tuesday February 13, 2024 @09:47AM (#39358057)

Okay

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by 1-more on Monday February 12, 2024 @03:21PM (#39349926)

God are they ever nice saws too. Good for you big dog.

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by Sohcahtoa82 on Monday February 12, 2024 @02:44PM (#39349394)

> computer people are slow to pick up this sort of stuff from other fields

Because computer people aren't optimizing for functionality, intuitiveness, or really any sort of UX.

They're optimizing for some idea of "beauty" and whatever is trendy.

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by mattmaroon on Monday February 12, 2024 @05:28PM (#39351393)

And you don’t die if your mute switch is in the wrong position at the wrong time.

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by wruza on Tuesday February 13, 2024 @07:26AM (#39356992)

Users may disagree.

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by mattmaroon on Tuesday February 13, 2024 @01:28PM (#39360952)

Users who survived being unmuted.

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by sumtechguy on Monday February 12, 2024 @03:58PM (#39350404)

The real pain is this WAS a solved problem in computers too. Almost all of the GUI OS's had a style guide. Usually 2-3 pages at most (usually smaller) and fairly easy to follow. Then everyone went bonkers and wanted to make their own. Then dump that all into one desktop and good luck... Every app is special.

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by armchair_expert on Tuesday February 13, 2024 @05:04AM (#39356182)

I blame Microsoft for this. They release a completely new UI framework every 5 years, completely abandoning the old ones. The design is outdated and boring. The XAML based UI frameworks look terrible if you use the default settings, and force you to customize. It's great that it's easy to create custom UIs, but terrible for consistency between apps.

On the Apple side, things look a lot better. They were able to keep most apps using the native UI.

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by sumtechguy on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @01:37PM (#39373423)

Apple was just as bad. :( They switched at least 5 times in the early 2000s. Like you point out though they finally seemed to have calmed down.

MS had it in the bag too! Everyone wanted that 'sticker'. If you didnt have it almost no one would put your software on the shelf. To get that sticker you had to pass their usability tests that followed their style guide. Then they did like you said and switched it at least 2 times ever OS release.

Plus the web got in there and there were almost zero standards there. So we ended up with dozenes of framerworks that 'do it for you' and those have at least 3-5 generations of goop.

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on Monday February 12, 2024 @11:30AM (#39346815)

I like it. Why doesn't our "industry" look at aviation/military more often where miscommunication gets people killed.

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by ajmurmann on Monday February 12, 2024 @12:50PM (#39347963)

I think the answer is that "looking pleasant" is much more of a goal for commercial software. In usability terms the much denser GUIs of the 90s were arguable better in some ways than what we frequently see today, especially for power users.

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by kfarr on Monday February 12, 2024 @02:18PM (#39349026)

Yes just like the design of car infotainment systems -- looking good resulted in the touch screen era. Luckily we're finally realizing our mistake and a few automakers are putting old school knobs back in.

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by pavon on Monday February 12, 2024 @04:08PM (#39350529)

A chunk of my early career was writing GUI software to control and display state of remote hardware, and I quickly learned to banish any "stateful" UI elements - those that retained their own state and changed behavior based on that state, like toggles, switches, check boxes, radio boxes, etc - because it wasn't uncommon for the interface and hardware state to get out of sync.

What I ended up settling on to replace them was a button for each option, where the respective button would light up to display the current state. For example, what would be an on/off toggle became two buttons labeled on and off. Initially both buttons were grey, and when the UI received SOH from the hardware indicating that the state was on, the on button became green, or for off, the off button became red. If communication was lost for some time all the colors became desaturated, to indicate the state was stale. When a button was pressed, the old state continued to be displayed, but desaturated (for just that button set), until a new state was received back. The user could always command the system on or off at any time (by clicking the respective button) regardless of what state the UI though it was in, unlike a toggle which only lets to you change to the "other" state. Likewise, radio buttons were replaced with a series of buttons labeled with their state, and the one the UI thought was current was colored (using blue for most "neutral" states and green/yellow/red if the state had a good/warn/bad meaning to the operator that they wanted to highlight).

Despite the atypical design, I found that operators generally understood the interface without training - buttons looked like buttons so they must be clickable. The spacing of buttons made it clear they were a set, and since grey was the default color of everything in 90s UI, the button that was colored differently stood out and must be the current state. I don't know if that would be the case today, where UI element can be any color chosen for aesthetics or funneling and only sometimes communicate information.

I did experimented with displaying both the commanded state and received state in various ways (akin to NASA's buttons), but all ended up being more confusing.

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Re:Should toggle button show its current state or the state ... by Doxin on Tuesday February 13, 2024 @03:47AM (#39355809)

Interesting design choices. I can see how that'd work very well.

> I did experimented with displaying both the commanded state and received state in various ways

Did you try keeping the commanded button in the pressed state until the next state update? I feel like that should be fairly intuitive to most people, and it'd still allow you to give a different command while the state hasn't updated yet.

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