Checkbox Dropdown… aka WTF, Google?
A few days ago Google revealed a slightly updated look for Gmail. It has several issues (and some good points), but the one this post is concerned with with the new element they are pushing… the checkbox drop down. If you haven’t seen it, take a gander below at the pic from Flickr. The poster has been kind enough to even put my thoughts in text on the image itself.
What is this, indeed, Gmail? What are this elements affordances? Well.. clicking. It inherits the affordances of the elements it combines (checkboxes and select boxes). The trouble is not in this general term of affordance (all of the screen affords clicking), but in perceived affordance. What is the user to expect from clicking that element? The standard labels (or perhaps first item in the case of a select) are not present. The user has only to guess.
From this more complete view, one might guess from the context, especially if you are a long time Gmail user, that checking that box does a ‘select all’ on all those other checkboxes. I even cropped the image to help your guess. And you would be correct. Good job! You won Google’s version of mystery meat navigation!
Of course, you still don’t know what type of items are in that drop down.
You only have to look to the Google support forum to find people who thought Gmail has removed all filtering from the site. Now I imagine that Google tested this with users and got a result that said people still used the filters found in that drop down (it has ‘select all’, ‘select none’, ‘select read’, etc, if you hadn’t guessed). I also imagine that they didn’t bring anyone into their testing labs and actually look at them while doing this test. Sure, when I first saw the new design, I was still able to use the filters. Much like mystery meat navigation, it is just a matter of trial and error. But if they had just watched the people using it instead of using some software to track usage, I am sure they would have seen the same confused reactions I did in my friends (and that I had myself); One of ‘what the heck is that? Let’s click it and see what happens.’
This is not the way to design an interface. “Well, they will figure it out,” is not good enough. Even if it does save 16px in page height.
