Chapter 17

Making Choices with Pop-Up Buttons

Radio buttons and check boxes let users select from multiple options. Unfortunately, each time you need to display another option, you also need to display another radio button or check box, which takes up space. The more radio buttons or check boxes displayed, the more cluttered and confusing your user interface will look.

To avoid this problem, you can also display options to the user through pop-up buttons. A pop-up button takes up a minimal amount of space, but when the user clicks it, a list of options appears that can be far more numerous than the limited number of choices you could display through multiple radio buttons or check boxes.

When you need to display a large number of options and need to conserve space on your user interface, use a pop-up button in place of multiple radio buttons or check boxes. The drawback is that all the available options won't be visible to the user at all times. The advantage is that hiding all the available options prevents your program from overwhelming the user with too many choices.