Can’t touch this: disabling controls or warning users?
Just discovered an interesting thing with GMail, and now I can’t decide between two trains of thought - if you don’t want your users to “do” something i.e. click a button, should you disable the control completely, or display a message?
Going back to the GMail example, the buttons immediately above the list of messages (Delete, Mark as read etc.) are enable at all times. However, these buttons only perform an action when one or more messages are selected, resulting in the message “No conversations selected.” being displayed to the user. Having one or more messages selected will process the desired action without question. This is handy as it directs the user to perform a required action, but can take up screen space and could lead to bemused clicking if the message is ignored or not seen.
The alternative to this would be to disable the controls completely when no messages are selected. It could be argued that it may confuse the user, giving them no indication as to what needs to be done first before the controls are enabled. However, surely if you’re on a web-based email service (and indeed on the web in general), it should be pretty apparent that a page involving a list of items and buttons labelled with a verb requires the selection of at least one item from the list first. This obviously saves on the screen space issue created by a message, but could lead to confusion as to what actually needs to be done to enable the control.
So which is best? Enabled/message or disabled/select first? Both have their merits, both have their issues. Decisions!
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