Question

I’ve been looking at various ways to allow a user to select one or more choices from a list of approximately 29-30 options. I’ve come up with the following four types, and wonder which is preferred/most usable. See http://workingstorage.com/multiple%20selection.png

Answer 1

Here’s how I would rank each option you have there, along with my reasoning:

Best: #2, if adjusted to break on year boundaries (i.e. always have a the full year in one column, so either have one year per column, or two, or whatever works out, but make sure that the user never has to move past the bottom of one column to find the next value for that year). This option will let users find the years they are interested in most quickly.

Second: #4. I’m tempted to put #3 here, because it seems more functional, but the illustration makes me wonder 1) if all the options are still available here and 2) if all users will understand what the four buttons do. Because of the confusion factor, I’m dropping #3 to last place. Which makes #4 second best, because it is cleaner than #1 (unless #1 happens to fit the rest of the design perfectly).

Third: #1 – by default.

Fourth: #3, save with the caveats presented above.