Radio Buttons: a bad design?

Just a thought: once a user clicks on some radio button, it'll be selected, but the user will have no standard way to remove/undo this selection. The only possibility is to switch to another radio button on the same radio button group. As far as I know*, this behavior occurs on all popular GUIs, including web, windows forms, qt and gtk, and probably others.

It's been like that for so many years, isn't it time to add a "deselect radio button" standard? Just like a checkbox, a single click would be a simple enough way to undo a selection. For special cases, a "ForceSelection" property may indicate that this radio button group cannot be deselected, to preserve the current behavior.

* I merely researched this topic, it's a just-a-thought kind of post and might be inaccurate.

2 thoughts on “Radio Buttons: a bad design?

  1. Dotan Dimet

    Isn't what you want just round checkboxes? Radio buttons are intended for A or B choices. Chicken or Beef. If you want to add "none of the above", that's a third radio button.

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