What's the best control to toggle between three states?

Question

Background

I have a list of statements that make up a definition. In this case it's for healthcare so its attributes about a person. Currently, we have a checkbox to allow someone with the knowledge to define the truth of a statement.

[ ] Patient is 65 years old or older

This gives me a "true" or "unset".

Problem

Users can skip over the unset state as something they don't care about. However, now we're adding an AI element that parses background information and will return a known false, a known true or an unknown/unset.

[ ] Patient is 65 years old or older - AI "No" patient's date of birth is 50 years before today.

The catch is that sometimes the AI gets it wrong so a human needs to be able to override the choice.

Question

What's the best way to display all these states and still allow the user to override it? I doubt any users will actually set these to strictly false but they should still get the option. Users WILL frequently override the AI's unknown with a true.

I'm considering the ability to cycle between states for each click and then creating checkbox states that look negative, look neutral and look positive.

Is that intuitive? I expect users will receive training on this system but I wonder if there's a better way to go about it? Anyone have examples of this done well? I considered a "dropdown" or select style interaction but that actually seems more mentally complex.

Answer 1

Using the 'checkbox' style will confuse a known interaction: that of a single selection checkbox being binary.

The control is standing in for an icon as well, and without a label, icons can confuse users.

If you have a grid of items, you can have an assessment row w/ select controls, and it's only 2 clicks to change an item, and the label is persistent and visible:

You have this way:

• A selection control signifying what's editable
• An icon and color change for two visual distinctions
• An explicit label indicating the current status