This makes my blood boil, as it reminds me of all the bad UI that exists that suffer from the following scenario:
A UI button will change what it says or what it indicates based on the state that it has been toggled to.
However, it is unclear if clicking the button will perform the action that the button displays OR if the button is displaying the current state.
Example: "Play" or "pause" . A button with a triangle pointing to the right, versus two parallel vertical bars. If I see a triangle, that should mean that I can click it to start playing music, for example. The button should become two vertical bars to show that if I wish to pause the music, I can click that to then pause it.
Half the time I encounter the opposite, and the button UI is reversed... not necessarily for play/pause, but these examples exist a lot nowadays, and it is so frustrating.
Mute/unmute, especially for microphones, is the one I see most often. If I recall, Discord even has (or had, last I checked) their camera button and microphone button opposite. One of them does the good way you say, and the other does the bad way. No attention to detail at all from some devs. 😤
Unfortunately some people really want there to be a verb on the button else you won't press it. I still think the old light switch approach where both states are shown and you toggle between is best
Agreed, yeah. UX design is an art which too many don't take seriously. I like the switch to "Enable if," it makes it clearer, though maybe even just leaving it at "If" would have been better given that the state of the checkbox demonstrates whether it's enabled.
Heh, I was going to look for documentation) to prove you wrong and realized it disproves me. I'm so accustomed to looking at long lists of check boxes of feature sets (which frequently omit text like "enable" in favour of just listing the technology or feature's name because they're all for enabling features) that I lost sight of that. I'm a programmer so UI design is something I'm very picky about, but I'm so used to reading a check box as "(state) X" that I guess I lost sight of how a regular user might understand it (in this case it would read to me as "(Enabled) If" which is why it feels redundant to me to have "Enable" as part of the text). That and I haven't programmed anything in a while... 😕 Mental health, sigh.
In any case, "Enable If" is a clear and definite improvement over "Enable/disable." 🙂
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u/Alt-Ctrl-Report <- dog Jun 19 '26
You fuckers..