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Comment by lgreiv | Hacker News Reader

To me, the semantic difference between the two is that I expect a toggle to cause an immediate effect whereas a checkbox merely holds the value to be applied later.

Applied to a client/server web application, I would expect a toggle to immediately cause a request to the backend. I’d expect a checkbox to be used in a form which is sent as a whole on submit.

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This is exactly it, 100%.

But it's taken some time for UX paradigms to coalesce around this -- simply because checkboxes used to be used for both, until Apple "invented" toggles for instantly-applied settings in iOS.

Now that Apple finally implemented toggles in System Settings in macOS Ventura, the paradigm is largely consistent in desktop software on Macs. Toggles apply a setting instantly, while checkboxes are used within an "OK/Cancel" dialog.

But I think because it's taken so long for toggles to "spread", a lot of users and developers have an instinctual understanding that toggle = instant, but haven't always been able to articulate it.

While I think that's somewhat true to a degree, I think that might be largely because where checkboxes are used (on desktop), there are normally OK or Apply buttons which do the actual action, whereas where toggles are used, things are normally "live", and so they don't have OK or Apply buttons...

What is your expected UX for a toggle with poor network reliability?

I have seen several variations that I found consistent with the metaphor of a switch.

Broadly, these could be divided in implementations that offered a loading state (switch goes transparent until persisted, overlaid spinner etc.) and implementations that flicked the switch back when the request failed and provided a very noticeable status update (hint, animation, growl).

My preference for systems that work with unreliable persistence is the former, albeit that is purely personal and not founded in a deeper rationale.

I'd expect it to work on submission only if I saw actual submit button, regardless of what else is in config. I also strongly dislike apps that do the instant thing, coz there is no way to undo something if I made a mistake (say removed some value that I shouldn't)

I don't have that expectation. What caused you to have it?

It's cultural, check boxes come from boring and usually not greatly designed universe of Windows and Linux desktops, toggles come from immediacy of iOS devices.

I know I'm old but I still see light switches all around me. Doesn't anyone flip them anymore?

It's cultural but this has nothing to do with Windows, Linux, and iOS. You flip a switch, the light comes on immediately. This is about the immediacy of switches, not iOS devices.

No, we use apps to control lights now.

I'm guessing that historically toggle switches would (immediately) close some electric circuit, whereas checkboxes were used to mark things as done on some paper list.

Exactly this is it.

Great observation.

Checkboxes were used to indicate a request in a <form> that you later <submit>

Maybe we should use toggle switch only when the effect is immediately visible.

It is the metaphors that they apply, a toggle mimics a switch (e.g. a light switch) while a checkbox mimics it’s own paper counterpart.

Yeah, UI design often rely on familiarity and it's going to confuse some % of minority because people's experience are different (been trained with different environment and situation in life, plus arbitrary brain chemical etc)

I do have (or at least understand) that expectation.

Historically (90's, early 00's) in Windows, which had 95% of market share, almost any settings screen would only apply the settings you changed after you pressed the "Apply" button (apply the settings and stay in the screen) or "Save" (apply the settings and close the screen).

I'm not sure how Mac OS X fared in that regard. But, for some older people, "click an option and it's immediately active" is not how it was in the past.

I think that might be the underlying… misattribution(?).

Almost no macOS screens have ever worked like that. Their interface guidelines have always recommended against it.

> ...all changes that a user enters in a dialog box should appear to take effect immediately whenever possible. — macOS 9 guidelines: http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf

Following Apple’s sensibilities will get you both toggle switches and instant changes, though I’m not sure there's a connection within any single interface.

You are right. I just had to go back and look at some OS8 screenshots to confirm and indeed they don't have save/apply anywhere

you may not like it but this is what peak UX looks like

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos80

I think most of what you're referring to was Control Panel.

Control Panel was unique in settings applying immediately. Pretty much every app's preferences (or other settings) were a modal dialog with OK/Cancel, however.

So it was a step forwards when iOS's Settings app changed from checkboxes to toggles, because this reflected the immediate change. And now with Ventura, macOS has finally caught up as well.

I mourn the loss of apply and save buttons in settings screens. It's supposed to act as a transaction does in a database. You set the controls to your preferred state, click apply, and get an error message that setting Y cannot be active when setting X is. So you fix your adjustments and try again until you get it right. Without this, you've already set X, and Y is either still active or turning on X turned it off, so you're in a state you didn't want to be in and bad things may have already happened.

Timing may also be a problem. Settings might affect each other, or you may want to change a bunch of settings so that they all happen at once. You can also run into problems where you want to flip setting A from on to off and flip setting B from off to on, but they can't both be off or both be on at the same time.

My biggest annoyance though is that I have decades of doing it one way, and now it's flipped. Automatic saving on Microsoft Word when you're editing a file on OneDrive still annoys me. No longer can I take an older copy of something, change a few things, and save it as a new document. I've just managed to mangle the original document through sheer muscle memory (from five minutes ago when I did the same thing in the same copy of word to a document on my disk drive).

Storing the mechanical action is an added expense. Pure Latin character based mark additions (& reversals) could include o -> p, or q along with font dependent n to m, V to W, F to E; l or I to B, D, E, F, H, K, L, M, P, t or T.

Exactly. Push-on/push-off switches -- analogous to a checkbox -- have been popular for decades and remain so.

https://www.allelectronics.com/item/pb-173/spdt-on/off-pushb...

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