Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianmonk | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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).

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.")

Reply on news.ycombinator.com