Why the ‘none of the above’ checkbox pattern worries me

I recently read a blog post about how a GOV.UK service redesigned one of their questions in their application form.

The original question looked like this:

A question asking ‘Do you have a disability?’ with radio buttons for yes, no and prefer not to say

If you select ‘Yes’ you go here:

A question asking ‘What disabilities do you have?’ with a list of conditions as checkboxes

Looks pretty good to me.

But research showed that some users who had a condition (and were happy to disclose it) selected ‘No’ because they didn’t think of it as a disability.

To solve this, the team:

  1. Merged the two questions into one
  2. Added ‘or health conditions’ to the label
A question asking ‘Do you have any of these disabilities or health conditions?’ with a list of checkboxes with conditions and other options for ‘I do not have any of these disabilities or health conditions’ and ‘prefer not to say&quot’

This uses the ‘none of the above’ pattern which means that the last two checkboxes untick any other ticked checkbox (like radio buttons).

The result:

3 times the number of users selected a condition.

A huge improvement.

I know the team who did this work. They’re top class and the whole service was designed to a high standard. But this research-approved design pattern has me a little worried.

Here’s why:

Reason 1: It’s more effort to answer the question

This is because you have to think about how to answer two questions at the same time:

  1. Do you have a condition?
  2. Which conditions do you have?

Good questions ask one thing at a time.

Reason 2: It’s harder to select the most common answers

This is because you have to read through or past the conditions to get to the last two options (which are the most common).

Reason 3: The ‘none of the above’ pattern breaks convention

If you select one of the last two options, the checkboxes act like radio buttons.

Breaking convention could be confusing and carries risk.

Reason 4: It relies on a verbose error message when JavaScript is unavailable

Without JavaScript the checkboxes act as normal checkboxes.

This means you’re able to select multiple conditions as well as the last two options. But it doesn’t make sense to select a condition and ‘Prefer not to say’ at the same time.

You have to handle this with a long-winded, hard-to-read error message:

Error message saying “Select the disabilities or health conditions you have, or select ‘I do not have any of these disabilities or health conditions’ or ‘Prefer not to say’”

If your interface needs explaining, it’s complicated.

I also wonder if the research warranted such a major change.

The main problem seemed to be that users didn’t select ‘Yes’ to being disabled because they didn’t consider their condition to be a disability.

So how about changing the content of the first question so that it mentions ‘health condition’:

A question asking “Do you have a disability or health condition?” with radio buttons for yes, no and prefer not to say

Perhaps this is enough.

Perhaps it’s not.

Either way, my spidey sense kicks in when I see a convention-breaking pattern that introduces new problems.

Instead do the simplest iteration and see how users get on.

If it works, you’ve avoided all the risk.

If it doesn’t, you can justify exploring more complex patterns.

I have 4 more complex patterns for problems like the one above. I’m not saying they’re perfect but I am saying that they don’t break convention.

If you’d like to know what they are, you might like my course, Form Design Mastery:

https://formdesignmastery.com