Yesterday, faced with yet another clone form expecting of me a typical United States' address, I came to the inevitable drop down requesting (no, demanding!) my state. The company gave no option to clear this field, nor to choose a non-US variant, so, as they had kindly defaulted to Alabama, I moved on.
For the next field, country, I chose "Netherlands". And look what happened:
Those who know me and my work will know that I have hammered on for years about making web forms dynamic, and that input fields should change on the basis of country and language. But why (oh why?), when a company follows this mantra, are the fields that cause this dynamic change ALWAYS added AFTER the fields that they change? Is it a conspiracy to annoy the customer? To make the customer work at their very hardest in order to buy the products?
Or is somebody just not thinking things through?
1 comment:
The answer to your question:
"But why (oh why?), when a company follows this mantra, are the fields that cause this dynamic change ALWAYS added AFTER the fields that they change? Is it a conspiracy to annoy the customer? To make the customer work at their very hardest in order to buy the products? Or is somebody just not thinking things through?"is that they are designed with the wrong priorities. I guess that falls into your "not thinking things through", but I might consider it overthinking.
I've been guilty of that myself.
It happens because people are used to entering data in a certain manner, and software developers (or the marketing people mandating the design) try to conform to that.
For example: addresses in the US are name, address, city, state, zip, country. Putting the country at the top makes sense, but doesn't follow the normal flow that the user is expected to be familiar with.
So, I'd say this falls into the "doesn't think things through" category, because were they to think it through from a "what's more convenient to the intelligent user" instead of "what's more convenient to the type of user I expect to use my systems, which are the same boneheads who would rather watch commercials that learn how to drive a TiVO" they'd realize that:
(a) they don't have a very high opinion of their users/customers, so perhaps they should upgrade their opinions, and
(b) those customers that *do* matter would appreciate the benefit of an out-of-order field to save lots of work.
I run into it on the phone as well, when customer service asks me my street address, then zip code. Takes me aback for a second, but it makes sense because then they tell me my city and state.
What's even more strange are the times when the phone rep says "hold on a minute... if I type in the zip first, it will fill in the city and state, but I have to tab all around the form for it to get there..." so this problem is not just for web-forms.
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