Richard Wand, a colleague of mine here at Conchango, has posted an interesting article here that talks about whether a web site owner should give their browsers the ability to type in their title (e.g. Mrs, Mr, Dr...etc) or just offer them a list of options instead in a drop-down box.
He cites an interesting case at BA where they chose a drop-down box which actually consisted of 204 items. Richard attributes this to "technical constraints" and states: "We are defining the specification so we shouldn't be contrained by technical bits." That's an understandable point of view because Richard works in our award winning web design team and in that discipline the User Experience is key.
As a data professional though I am a little bit more sympathetic to BA's situation. The "technical constraints" that Richard speaks of can doubtlessly be better described as a desire by BA to ensure data quality in their systems - unweildy as that data may be to the end user. They are trying to avoid what Donald Farmer has referred to as idiothetic data quality issues. Data quality, as anyone who has worked on a data integration project will tell you, is one of the biggest (I would say THE biggest) contributory factors to success or failure of those types of project. Allowing users to type in freetext fields ultimately causes headaches for us data guys when we are attempting to deduplicate or categorise customers. For example, allowing people to type in freetext could(and will) result in all of the following titles being entered:
- Mr
- Mister
- Mr.
- Dr
- Dr.
- Doc
- Doctor
To the human eye its quite obvious that there are only really two distinct titles here but unfortunately machines generally aren't that smart and in the main these would be treated as seven seperate titles. From that point of view I applaud what BA have done - they are simply trying to improve the data quality in their systems.
However, I'm also a BA customer myself (or I might be) and as a user I don't want to have to select "Mr" from a list of 204 items. As Richard correctly states, "they have technical constraints battling with usability best practices" and therein lies the problem. This isn't an isolated case of course - incongruent data issues like this crop up all the time and will only increase as the web becomes all the more pervasive. A better solution to this problem needs to be found and indeed Richard himself suggests a very good one. I'll be interested to see how this one progresses, hoepfully Richard will keep us informed.
-Jamie