Patrick H. Lauke wrote:
Geoff Deering wrote:
So I cannot see how your argument applies, to me, it doesn't stand
up. A designer should not implement a design element where their
design falsely indicates to the user that the form control is in
another state than it is actually in. This is misrepresentation of
state.
The interpretation of the state a form control is currently in also
depends on the surrounding context. To pick up the earlier "don't use
grey at all" example: that may well be true if the surrounding
background is very light, but on a page with a very dark or black
background I'd posit that it would not immediately trigger that
"grey=disabled/read-only" association. As a sidenote: it's been a
while since I've actually come across any read-only inputs, and can't
really think of a scenario in which I'd want to use one (and
therefore, maybe I'm not thinking along the same lines - the need to
differentiate between "writable" and read-only inputs?).
But basically what I think I'm getting at is: just because there is a
chance that designers may not be judicious in their style choices and
confuse the user is not a strong enough reason to give a blanket "we
shouldn't style inputs at all" recommendation.
I think you are missing the whole point.
You find these types of web environments mostly on intranets. For a lot
of people in large organisations, these are primary interfaces they have
to work with. To neglect to address this issue correctly could easily
impact the integrity of data because the interface is not communicating
*state*, because if the designer is unaware of this, and overrides this
visual communication of state that the user agent is conveying, with
their own arbitrary design implementation, it would be miscommunicating
the state of the data. In this case, it would be a major design blunder.
----------
Geoff
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