Radio buttons are a real turn off

Like PowerPoint, the ‘radio buttons’ used so heavily in online surveys get a bad press. Research would like to contribute to this: radio buttons are horrid.

There’s nothing wrong in principle with a little round button that you click to choose an answer (just as there’s nothing wrong with a piece of presentation software complete with templates and visual effects). But in practice there’s quite a lot wrong.

We’ve been doing some online surveys in the office recently, and our hatred for the radio button has grown strong. First of all, they’re ugly. They’re devoid of style, making surveys look like the complicated settings on your computer that you only touch when something’s gone wrong. But more importantly, they’re fiddly. The gaps between them are generally bigger than the buttons themselves, so you have to be quite deft with a mouse to work through them, especially when the text used to label them has been put at the other side of the screen. From a usability point of view, they’re a liability. And surveys can’t afford that because, unlike most things on the internet, the benefit of a survey is very much skewed away from the user and towards the website.

So should we ban radio buttons from surveys? Would we miss them?

Defenders might say that radio buttons don’t kill respondents, researchers do. What’s more, they have become a scapegoat, a shorthand that people use when they want to complain about poor design, lack of care, lack of imagination.

It’s true that the real problem is the misuse of radio buttons, not the buttons themselves. But when they are so often misused, and so painfully (we’ve gone through grids of more than 150 of them and emerged gasping for breath), that point seems academic. If they weren’t available, maybe there’d be less crime.

So could a ban work? Let’s look at an example where it’s been done: London-based research agency Cobalt-Sky has developed its own survey software and banned the old radio buttons and check boxes. They haven’t looked back. Managing director Raz Khan told Research: “We’ve watched a lot of conference presentations where people have talked about why surveys still look like they did at the end of the 1990s, when the rest of the web has become much more graphically rich and interesting. Then I kept seeing companies claiming they had all these Flash toolkits, but actually were still using the old check boxes and buttons. They only used the Flash tools on high days and holidays or when the client was willing to pay extra.”

When the firm developed its own tools – which are offered at the same prices as before – staff liked the new capabilities but still found the transition hard work, Khan said. Eventually, though, he decided the firm had to bite the bullet. “I thought, we’re not going to do this unless we just stop messing about with the old system. So I told them: ‘You’re not going to do any more surveys using radio buttons and check boxes. I want you to produce good-looking surveys every time.’ There’s no excuse. No one’s going to see a Cobalt-Sky survey with the old-fashioned stuff unless they specifically want it.”

The firm has now been using its new interface on every project for several months. So there you are: it can be done. Let us know whether you support a ban on radio buttons in surveys using the poll on the right-hand side. The buttons in the poll are, of course, exempt from the rule.