I’ve been wireframing an online mp3 player, and pondering this trivial detail: whether to use a toggle button for play/pause, or two permanent, free-standing buttons, with only their selection state being toggled.
Considerations of space militate for the first option. Why use two buttons when one will do? And the toggling nicely encapsulate the either-or logic of the button: if the player is playing, you can pause…or it is paused, you can play.
Yet I’m resisting this conclusion. Even when I had cheap Panasonic cassette player in the early 80s, the toggle button always felt awkward.
Here are two reasons:
1) The pause/play toggle logic forces you to mix two categories: YOU CAN (your possible action) play because THE PLAYER IS (the player state) paused. A button is supposed to represent that action, of course, but it insidiously comes to represent the player state as well. So the momentary awkwardness is rooted in this ambiguity: If the player is paused does that represent that PAUSED state of the player–or the PAUSE that you can effect on a PLAYING player?
Got that, slick?
Note that this ambiguity does not exist in the most common toggle of all, the light switch, because we never expect a light switch to represent a state. If you to turn the light on or off, you flip the switch. It does not matter if the switch is up or down, you just flip it. (I’ve lived in many a ramshackle apartment, and non-standard light switches never fazed me, even momentarily.)
2) The pause/play toggle is, like many binaries, inherently unstable because opposites keep referring to each other.
An example: I live at the end of a street at an intersection. I can park at 3 different curbs. (The intersection is with a major street with a island in the middle, so I can’t park on the opposite side of that street.)
So, like many apartment dwellers, I have to move my car for street cleaning, which is once-a-week for each curb. Maybe you know the drill.
So here’s the glitch. I can ALWAYS remember that the curb on the major street is cleaned on Monday, but I can NEVER remember which day the two facing curbs on my street are cleaned–Tuesday, or Wednesday? Wednesday, Tuesday? Two years in, I still look at the sign.
I think this is because the curbs are self-defining opposites, and one suggests the other, like right suggests left and vice-versa and so on.
Perhaps a road system based on 3-point intersections would be easier to master?
As I designer–and an addled victim of infinite regress–I think I’ll try harder to avoid strong symmetries (two identical columns side-by-side, for instance).
