The following image shows the problem and should be self-explanatory. The markers on the EQ graph and the markers on the button should point in the same direction.
Custom target range mode switch - Indicator icon wrong way round!
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Hi Manny,
Thanks for your post!
The markers on the button refer to switching/flipping to the inverted option of the calibration range, this is why they don't match with the direction of the markers in the graph itself.
Thanks for pointing this out, though, perhaps there is something that we can improve in this regard, so I have forwarded your feedback to our team of course :) -
Hi Zane. The "Calibration Enabled" button is also a toggle button, and it shows the current state, not the inverted state. The difference is that the Calibration Enabled button has a text caption that clarifies what it means. This is an elementary UX design problem that I see too often. The only time a two-state button should be used is when it is completely unambiguous, which happens when one ore more of the following conditions are met:
The approach you guys are using is the "dynamic caption" approach, which means the text changes or the icon changes when the button is clicked. This is bad UX design because it requires extra mental work from users, as it forces users to read the text. A checkbox with a static text caption is completely unambiguous, all the user needs to worry about is the state of the checkbox. Once users are familiar with the GUI, they don't even need to read the caption, because they already know what "the checkbox near the corner" is for.
Usually two-state switches that don't represent on/off states should be avoided because they are ambiguous. This is the case of the range mode switch in SoundID. For example, a bypass switch works because it means on or off. You can immediately tell what it means by looking at the icon. However, a switch that toggles between "band pass" and "band stop" is not an on/off situation. If the switch was on/off and then had a "band pass" text caption next to it, essentially functioning as a traditional checkbox, when the switch is enabled that would mean "band pass on" and when disabled it would mean "band pass off" (= band stop).
A switch that shows the two states simultaneously and highlights the active state is the most intuitive implementation. Below is a possible mock-up of what this might look like. Please note, it looks like two buttons but it is actually just one big button with two icons (two separate buttons is worse because it forces users to aim for the correct half of the button each time they need to toggle it). In other words, all your developers would need to do is change the icon of the existing button to fix this. As you can see, this is completely unambiguous.
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