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Comment by adrianmonk | Hacker News Reader

An alternative UX pattern is to have a "yes" checkbox and a "no" checkbox for each one of the options, with (obviously) neither checked by default. If a user positively answers yes or no for each option, then an all-"no"s response equates to a positive "none".

It's very tedious, so you should probably not do this most of the time. But it could be appropriate if it's extremely important to encourage the user to individually consider whether each of the options applies. By forcing them to click on each line, you discourage them from rushing through without reading, skipping to the end, and just checking "none".

I've seen this UX pattern on paper vaccine forms, for example. They want to know if (1) I'm pregnant, (2) I'm allergic to eggs, and (3) I have Guillain-Barré syndrome. They could ask me to check all that apply, but instead they have yes/no for each one.

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As much as I prefer electronic forms over paper, the ability to draw a continuous vertical line through all of those "no" boxes is quite nice compared to actually marking each separately.

I smell an opportunity for someone to create gesture-based HTML forms.

Seriously though, this brings up an important point. People don't like excessive paperwork, so this pattern should be used very sparingly.

Users' time and attention is a scarce resource. You can't magically create more of this scarce resource by applying a UX pattern. People will respond by putting themselves on "click no, no, no, no, no, no, and no" autopilot.

I'll often find a keyboard sequence to speed it up, usually something like tab-tab-space, tab-tab-space (assuming each question is a set of 2 radio buttons or checkboxes... for drop-down lists it's often a matter of typing the first letter or several, like tab, n, tab, n).

I build data collection instruments for biomedical research and we often put "yes to all" and "no to all" at the top of a table of yes/no questions

Does clicking on those, cause the relevant checkboxes underneath to be ticket?

That would help in case one was yes and all of the others were a no. You could just say "no to all" and then just change the one that should be a yes.

Don't forget that mobile is the majority now. As long as the hit target is appropriately sized, this is the kind of task that is much faster with touch than mouse/trackpad.

Users value attention more than time. I'd bet that 4 yes/no radio buttons require a lot less attention than trying to parse the example question from the article ("Will you be travelling to any of the following countries with any of these trailers? Select all countries that apply.")

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