A client recently asked
me whether the Courtesy Title field for their Contact Form should be a
drop-down menu or a text-input control. This conundrum needs to account
for this client’s impressive International clientele. Not just your
regular Mr & Mrs but the full spectrum of titles ranging from Spiritual
Leaders to Royalty. Being an International client they also want to include
international variants – Mrs, Frau, Madam etc
BA is the 'master of the
scroll'. Their Title drop-down menu has a staggering 204 options! Why did
BA opt for a drop-down and not a text field? BA gave the reason that they
are integrating with 3rd party software which cannot handle free
text so populating a drop-down menu with the full range of courtesy titles was
to prevent their system from falling over. Is their form’s usability suffering
at the hands of data integrity?
As I searched the web for
further examples of scrolling-superstars I stumbled upon the following
tongue-in-cheek quote: - ‘Perhaps BA will be introducing drop lists for Given
names and Surnames next, they seem to like them so much?’
So if critics out there
think a 204 item drop-down list is laughable then what is the recommended
solution? Is there a better solution?
What would Jakob Nielsen
think?
Without a shadow of a
doubt he would preach avoiding excessive number of items in a drop-down
list. OK – so if this is widely accepted in the usability community then
how did the country drop-down list become a standard? It seems in this
case that we are compromising best practices by exploiting a loop-hole in the
fundamental principles of usability. Many sites try to improve usability
for a large percentage of their users by repeating the most frequently selected
countries at the top of the scrolling list (i.e. United Kingdom, US etc) but this
still doesn’t confirm to Jakob’s recommendations.
A simple rule that Jakob
follows is that if users can’t see all the options in a single glance then it’s
not usable.
After running some crude
user tests the results showed that it's faster for a user to type in the
majority of courtesy titles rather than select from a scrolling list of 204
items. So why not allow free text? Well, in BA’s case they have technical
constraints (data integrity) battling with usability best practices.
We are defining the
specification for the client who raised this question so we shouldn't be
contrained by technical bits. Therefore one option we can consider is an input
field which functions similar to Google Suggest?
As the user types their title they are offered suggestions of accepted titles
in real time. The user can override the suggested terms but it would
offer a more usable option to a regular input field whereby the user would need
to type all of ‘Brigadier General’. With the example list below as soon
as the user types ‘B’ they would be offered the following data: - Baron,
Barones, Brig, Brig Gen, Brig General, Brigadier, Brigadier General and
Brother. That’s an abvious improvement on the plain text box.
The list below is the
mammoth 204 entries from the BA title drop-down - yikes! I'm not sure
what the reasoning was behind including abbreviations of some of the courtesy
titles For example, Brig General and Brigadier General.
- Mr
- Mrs
- Ms
- Miss
- Dr
- Herr
- Monsieur
- Hr
- Frau
- -
- A V M
- Admiraal
- Admiral
- Air Cdre
- Air Commodore
- Air Marshal
- Air Vice Marshal
- Alderman
- Alhaji
- Ambassador
- Baron
- Barones
- Brig
- Brig Gen
- Brig General
- Brigadier
- Brigadier General
- Brother
- Canon
- Capt
- Captain
- Cardinal
- Cdr
- Chief
- Cik
- Cmdr
- Col
- Col Dr
- Colonel
- Commandant
- Commander
- Commissioner
- Commodore
- Comte
- Comtessa
- Congressman
- Conseiller
- Consul
- Conte
- Contessa
- Corporal
- Councillor
- Count
- Countess
- Crown Prince
- Crown Princess
- Dame
- Datin
- Dato
- Datuk
- Datuk Seri
- Deacon
- Deaconess
- Dean
- Dhr
- Dipl Ing
- Doctor
- Dott
- Dott sa
- Dr
- Dr Ing
- Dra
- Drs
- Embajador
- Embajadora
- En
- Encik
- Eng
- Eur Ing
- Exma Sra
- Exmo Sr
- F O
- Father
- First Lieutient
- First Officer
- Flt Lieut
- Flying Officer
- Fr
- Frau
- Fraulein
- Fru
- Gen
- Generaal
- General
- Governor
- Graaf
- Gravin
- Group Captain
- Grp Capt
- H E Dr
- H H
- H M
- H R H
- Hajah
- Haji
- Hajim
- Her Highness
- Her Majesty
- Herr
- High Chief
- His Highness
- His Holiness
- His Majesty
- Hon
- Hr
- Hra
- Ing
- Ir
- Jonkheer
- Judge
- Justice
- Khun Ying
- Kolonel
- Lady
- Lcda
- Lic
- Lieut
- Lieut Cdr
- Lieut Col
- Lieut Gen
- Lord
- M
- M L
- M R
- Madame
- Mademoiselle
- Maj Gen
- Major
- Master
- Mevrouw
- Miss
- Mlle
- Mme
- Monsieur
- Monsignor
- Mr
- Mrs
- Ms
- Mstr
- Nti
- Pastor
- President
- Prince
- Princess
- Princesse
- Prinses
- Prof
- Prof Dr
- Prof Sir
- Professor
- Puan
- Puan Sri
- Rabbi
- Rear Admiral
- Rev
- Rev Canon
- Rev Dr
- Rev Mother
- Reverend
- Rva
- Senator
- Sergeant
- Sheikh
- Sheikha
- Sig
- Sig na
- Sig ra
- Sir
- Sister
- Sqn Ldr
- Sr
- Sr D
- Sra
- Srta
- Sultan
- Tan Sri
- Tan Sri Dato
- Tengku
- Teuku
- Than Puying
- The Hon Dr
- The Hon Justice
- The Hon Miss
- The Hon Mr
- The Hon Mrs
- The Hon Ms
- The Hon Sir
- The Very Rev
- Toh Puan
- Tun
- Vice Admiral
- Viscount
- Viscountess
- Wg Cdr
I am currently
investigating a number of options and will post a response when I solve this
conundrum.