Am I the only C3 dev constantly confused by the expand/collapse arrow icons?

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  • Currently the C3 section expand/collapse arrow icons indicate the "state" of the section. Why? I'm looking at my screen so I can already see the state of my sections. UI buttons should always display icons and/or text that clearly indicates what the button does.

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  • They're designed to work the same way as the expand/collapse icons in Windows. I assumed Microsoft's design was a standard or widely understood one.

  • Hmmmm, Ok, not sure why I haven't noticed that in Windows. C3 does match that. Regardless, if you lookup any of the millions of application UX design guides, patterns and practices, they will all say buttons should be recognizable as a button and should indicate what the button click does. So they're actually incorrect in Windows too :-/

    Unless...

    There is some established design (that I haven't seen so far) that says UI expand/collapse arrows should be reversed?

  • There are lots of subtleties in UI design. I don't think expand/collapse icons count as push buttons (like an OK button on a dialog), and if you're reading UI guidelines relating to "buttons", it may mean "push buttons", and not cover other cases.

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  • True, with accordion and other hierarchical controls, the right/down arrows are a state indicator and a clickable item. If the arrow icon was only a button there might be a problem, but as a part of an expandable grouping and display control it's such a common convention that most of us don't even think about it. jQueryUI, Bootstrap and other frameworks use arrows in this way.

    Sure, +/- icons on accordions actually follow the "button should indicate action" rule, but I prefer the look of arrows as they seem more clearly descriptive to me.

  • I can live the reversed arrows ;-)

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