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February 15, 2005Seth Godin vs. The United States of AmericaSeth Godin complains about the "persistence of really bad ideas", for instance, the U.S. State pulldown menus in so many web applications:
This scrolling led to a similar breakthrough to enter your country. Afghanis get a big break (so do people from Andorra) but those in the biggest online consuming country on earth have to scroll all the way down to the 'U's.
No wonder so many people abandon shopping carts online.
As he points out, country lists are even worse. Far more annoying in my opinion than the 50-state list is the 130-some-odd country names in a country pulldown menu. Seth doesn't propose any better alternatives. He suggests it'd be easier to just type in the name of the state. Problem is, people make mistakes. Even with two-letter abbreviations. Quick: identify MS, MO, MI, MN. Or AL and AK. Here's a quick-and-dirty alternative, that lets you see all the states in one glance, and quickly pick one:
 Doesn't consume any more space in a form; you'd click on the little down-arrow thingie to launch the little popup selector, pick your state, it automatically populates the form with the correct entry, presto, done.
Posted by brian at 09:35 PM
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