Hacker News Reader

Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

> But when a select menu appears, they have to move their hands from keyboard to mouse to select an option. This interrupts their typing flow and slows them down.

Simply not true. They do not have to; they just don't know that when the keyboard focus is on the list or combo box, they can go through the selections using the arrow keys.

But even for those who know the keyboard shortcuts, long lists are annoying, like long lists of countries (most of which will never produce a paying customer for that site), or lists of of years starting from 1900.

View on HN

To be honest, that reminds me.

Why do sites use drop down menus for years like that?

I mean, in new browsers (or older ones with Javascript) you can add perfectly good calendars for things like date of birth, booking date, etc. In other ones, you can just let them type in the value in some restricted format. Who honestly cares if someone claims to be 150 years old?

Moreover, if you want to be able to filter out bogus entries, you have to let users enter bogus info. If you put in too many constraints, you hamstring your ability to tell bogus from good. For instance if you reject 555-NNNN phone numbers because 555 is fake, the determined user will enter a more convincing fake phone number.

> Why do sites use drop down menus for years like that?

One reason is that it's a (extremely) lazy / dead simple way of getting around the need to do input validation on the year field.

> long lists of countries (most of which will never produce a paying customer for that site)

On the other hand, it's extremely frustrating to arrive to this step, fill in all your details, and there, right at the end, open the country list and... it's just a handful of large English-speaking countries including one that neighbours your own country, but not yours.

What would you suggest in order not to have an annoying long list of countries, but still allowing everyone to order even if you did not expect customers from Luxembourg or San Marino?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com