Stop Using ‘Drop-Down’

Thing is my customer, Bob From Marketing, wants a new feature. He knows "Text Input","Drop Down","Form","Button", "Checkbox" as terms to communicate his feature to me. He knows this because he used to code some Visual Basic on the side when he was "still a programmer" all those years ago.

Now in reality, I don't take any thing Bob tells me literally as directions. I treat it more as a description of Bobs problem. I then forget everything he told me he wanted and build the tool necessary to do the job he's described.

"drop-down" works just fine thank you. It's adequately descriptive to support its most common application - which is communicating with non-technical people.

But what about communicating with a technical person? Well, they're going to do what they want to/the sensible thing anyhow no matter what I call it.

This is nuts. Please don't encourage people to stop using such a tried-and-tested, well understood, descriptive word. Talking about UI/UX is hard enough without taking that away. What the author is actually criticizing is a lack of detail regarding UX and implementation in feature descriptions.

I use the word "dropdown" because it's the word that the non-technical people I work with use. They're not thinking in terms of HTML elements. If they ask me for a "dropdown" and I ask them if they "mean a <select> or a <datalist>?" they're going to think I'm just a pompous asshole.

I click it and it drops down. Ergo "dropdown." For better or worse, that's what it's called now.

I have no idea what this is about - would it really be such a stretch to add examples of the controls he is on about?

I've never been confused by "drop-down" I was confused by this post, though.

Does anyone else see a trend in recent times of posts that start with “Its time to start X/ Stop using X” instead of saying “I think there is some work to be done about X” or “IMO Y is better than X”.

Then turns out you read the thing and they have nothing to sustain that title.

People probably did call it 'a select', until non-technical users called it 'a drop-down' (because that's what it does, without knowing what the code looks like, why would you call it 'select'?) and the term came to dominate.

I don't think it's confusing, if anything it's used precisely so we aren't confused... like by the myriad options presented in this post when all we really meant was 'any old thing that drops down and a user will call a drop-down'.

Well this seems like something that isn't worth worrying about.

This post reads like it was written by a web developer that doesn't realize UI development happens on any other platform.

Dropdown is a perfectly fine term to use. Developers should be able to infer what is actually meant by additional requirements.

For me, select box is a control with predefined list of options that can be shown and hidden in window-blinds style. Combo box is the same, but new entry can be added by directly typing in the box. They look the same but have different behavior. Dropdown is any of those and thus defines only the visual aspect, not the behavior.

Stop using "stop using" blog posts.

No

`Drop-down` is imprecise, especially considering the difference between a navigation menu that drops down, compared with a a list of pre-set options.

There might be a few too many examples on this page, though.