I recently got a new laptop. Our previous one was a little dated and missing a few keys (it’s not a good idea to let your dog or your baby near the keyboard), so it was definitely time. I decided to go with an HP dv9428nr laptop. It had a decent Windows Experience Index, 17″ widescreen, and was the right price. The last few computers I’ve bought were all HPs, not because I’m a fan but just because those were the best I could get for the money. They’ve generally been good, so I don’t mind getting another.

However, recently HP started stealing part of your hard drive in order to store the recovery disc data. They partition off part of your C drive and store the recovery data there so that then they don’t need to create and ship the recovery discs with your new computer. You get to make your own! It’s a nice project for you and the kids on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Anyway, so I fire up the the system recovery disc creation utility. I tell it I want to use DVDs, click next and then come across this gem of a dialog:

As you can see in the third checkbox, the checkbox highlighted when I hovered my mouse over it. It was clickable. It wasn’t disabled. What the heck would happen if I clicked on? As I mentioned yesterday, that is one of my biggest pet peeves. I could have tried clicking on it, but I wouldn’t want it to screw up my recovery discs. And since I can only make one set of recovery discs ever, I may never know:

Anyhow, I see (at least) two things wrong here:

1) Checkboxes are being used to show progress. It’s much better to just use a progress bar instead, so that something like this:

…becomes something like this:

Users don’t really care about seeing the specifics of their progress, they just want to know how much is left to go. A progress bar gives them that.

2) Checkboxes aren’t disabled. Progress is controlled by what stage the application is in, so it’s not clear what would happen if you clicked the checkboxes.

A much better choice here would be to give the dialog two progress bars: one to indicate the current task’s progress and one for overall progress:

…or at the very least remove those darn checkbox controls and put up some non-clickable bitmaps!