Boing Boing featured a drop down from hell last week. Is a mega enumeration like this really necessary? Why not use a simple text field?
I find drop down boxes with years to be one of the saddest examples of enumeration overkill. I can type my birth date far faster than I can select it from a scrolling drop down crammed full of a hundred years. States are almost as bad. I’ll take a two letter MI in a text field against a fifty element select tag any day. I can type USA pretty fast, too. I bet most people can type their address elements pretty quickly if their browser autofill doesn’t beat them to it.
Don Norman includes Microsoft Outlook date handling in his cavalcade of good design for its ability to parse dates from arbitrary text.
In the comments to Building the Recipe Web, Troy Hakala talks about their efforts to natural language parse recipes for the recipezar site:
We (Recipezaar) wrote a natural language recipe parser to make this possible and it?s a difficult job. It took us 3 years to write it! Recipes are far more complicated than you might think, believe it or not. And a natural language recipe parser is not trivial software, which is why no other recipe web site has done this except for Recipezaar.
Text field parsing: harder to program, better for users?
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I’m not sure whether all users can type their country as fast as you or I – I know it would take my mum at least a minute to type “United Kingdom”
Also, if you have a drop down list the user knows instantly that they have to select an item from the list, whereas if they’re shown a text field they may fret over what format they have to type their date of birth, state, phone number, etc. in. That BA drop down list is a bit overkill, IMHO a drop down list should have a maximum of (approximately) 15 entries for it to be of any advantage to the user, any more than that causes the the user to actively search the list for the item they want, as opposed to just spotting it more-or-less straight away.
Interesting post, thanks.
How about UK?
Agree – think it is possible to do better with an input text field and some Javascript. That’s the idea behind the WACT InputAutoCompleteTag