(\_ -> Phil Varner) » design http://www.philvarner.com/blog mostly technical stuff Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:01:52 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1 en hourly 1 Bad UI: Avery DesignPro http://www.philvarner.com/blog/2008/12/30/bad-ui-avery-designpro/ http://www.philvarner.com/blog/2008/12/30/bad-ui-avery-designpro/#comments Wed, 31 Dec 2008 06:13:57 +0000 Phil http://www.philvarner.com/blog/?p=130 Avery is mainly know for their blank printer labels. Many people use Word for creating labels, but Avery also has their own program, Avery DesignPro. I used this last week to print some Christmas card labels, and found an excellent example of poor UI component design.

In these two screenshots, can you look at them and tell which means "print a full sheet of this label" and which means "print a different individual labels"? The relevant part of the UI is the All Same "button".

picture-2-21-34-47

picture-3

The answer is actually neither. The entire area of "All Same"/"On"/"Off" is one big button, rather than a label and a toggle. Clicking changes the value, rather than performing the action that the button indicates. This is very confusing to users, since it's rare that you click an off button to turn something on. A better design would to have two radio buttons with "all labels the same" and "different individual labels", or some such text, so that it would be clear which of these was currently selected and which one you were changing to.

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