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copied!<p>My advice is don't use generic multiple select controls. I've been running User Experience Research for my whole career, and every single time I test a site with multiple select controls, it always turns out to cause problems for end users. </p> <p>I did a post on this a while back: <a href="http://www.90percentofeverything.com/2008/12/03/multiple-select-controls-must-evolve-or-die/" rel="noreferrer">Multiple Select Controls Must Evolve or Die</a> </p> <p>Sounds like you knew this anyway, though. Your real question is "what do I use instead?" Well, to answer this question you have to work out whether the user's task leans towards <strong>recall</strong> or <strong>recognition</strong>. </p> <p><strong>(i) By recall</strong>, I mean the user knows what they want to pick before they have even seen the list. In this case, it's probably easiest for them if you offer an autocomplete tool (as used very effectively on facebook, for example). This solution is even better when the list of options is also impossibly long to present on a page (e.g. location names, etc). </p> <p><strong>(ii) Moving on to recognition</strong> - by this I mean a task that involves the user not knowing what they want to pick until they've seen the list of options. In this case, autocomplete doesn't give them any hints. An array of checkboxes would be much more helpful. If you can show them all at once, this is helpful to the user. Scrolling DIVs are more compact but they create a memory load for the user - i.e. once they've scrolled down, they have to remember which items they picked. This is particularly evident when users save a form and come back to it later. </p> <p>So - thinking about your problem, do you need a solution for recall or recognition? </p>

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