Drop Down Rant
November 22, 2006 by karen
This week I am reading Small is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas by Seth Godin. It is quite good–chock full of useful ideas and observations. While reading it on the subway today I came upon “Fifty States, Flamethrowers and Sticky Traditions” (previously posted on Godin’s blog as The persistence of really bad ideas in 2005) which questions the usage of drop down menus in forms. He notes how particularly annoying drop downs are for identify states, especially for people who live in states that fall later in the alphabet: New York, Rhode Island, Wyoming. Why not use a text field he wonders.
Godin’s “rant” reminded me of the online application process Limegroup uses for accepting new job applications. They ask applicants to fill out some standard information: name, address, email, upload a resume, etc. When applicants reach the “About your School” section of the application, they are asked to select an institution from a drop down menu of 20 or so highly regarded universities, ranging in schools from M.I.T. to Stanford. If you are one of the suckers that did not attend a top-tier school, you can select “other” from the bottom of the list. Maybe selecting “other” is programmed to automatically send your application to the trash upon hitting the submit button.
What is the purpose of the drop down? Why not a text field? I suppose we should give them credit for being up front about their elitist ways. With just one drop down menu the company suggests they have little interest in an applicant who attended, god forbid, a state school (other than U of Texas, that is). Say WHAT?! A STATE SCHOOL? Or in the kid who chose to stay close to home to help take care of family rather than heading east to M.I.T.
Part of what bothers me about this is that Lime is a seemingly decent company. They care about their employees, they develop interesting products, and yet, this application page makes me think they are elitists. I would like to think that if you are creating open source software you might be open minded about the backgrounds of the people that could help you develop these products.
Tags: technology
Posted in Uncategorized
November 22nd, 2006 at 6:06 pm
I’ve been seeing various Ajax-y solutions to this problem lately. Basically, either Google Suggest style text input boxes (https://www.wesabe.com), or select list replacements which display all the options but make better use of screen real estate than the standard select box (http://jetblue.com/). Of the two, I think I like the first better, particularly for cases, like the schools list, where you probably want to use the same answer someone else already has, but you may have a new answer that’s different. Also, I’m not sure about the accessibility issues on the select replacement approach.
I saw a great example of miss-use of the select list for honorifics about a year ago. I think it was on the Emirates web site. They tried to list out every potential honorific from every culture that might possibly book on Emirates, so they had a list of about a hundred titles, from Rear Admiral to Sultan, but no way to enter your own if it wasn’t already on the list.
However, for states, I still think the select list provides the best way to get clean data from users in an accessible way. Remember that you can use the keyboard to jump down the list when the field is highlighted, so for New York you just need to tab over to the field and hit ‘N’ a few times.
November 22nd, 2006 at 7:40 pm
I’m bothered that Penn isn’t on this list but UMass is.
November 26th, 2006 at 11:54 pm
manlio, of course that would be your only issue with this pre-populated menu…
December 8th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
you know, apple has a similar problem with its “occupation” menus when you’re registering. it’s really less than comprehensive.