Comment by read_if_gay_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by read_if_gay_ | Hacker News Reader

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So an example of an application of Hick's Law is when you have a huge country list dropdown. Per Hick's Law we know that presenting users with many choices is bad because it'll take them forever to make their pick. But if there's going to be a small number of options that the vast majority of users will choose, such as with countries it might be the US and a few EU countries, you can improve this by putting those countries first and presenting an alphabetically sorted list of the rest after them.

You can see how this doesn't just boil down to "make it simpler". And many of your summaries similarly miss the point.

I do admit that the website doesn't elaborate on the concepts very much. For example, if I hadn't known about Hick's law beforehand, I might have arrived at the same conclusion as you. But they do link further reading which seems to do the job of explaining the laws in detail. So I think the website is a nice reference if you go the extra mile and look at the links.

> But if there's going to be a small number of options that the vast majority of users will choose, such as with countries it might be the US and a few EU countries, you can improve this by putting those countries first and presenting an alphabetically sorted list of the rest after them.

I hate when people do this. It messes with selection by keystroke. It's frustrating and breaks the default means of using a drop-down box.

Agreed. I’d add there’s something perverse and elitist about ‘solving’ this problem by making it easier for one group of users and more difficult for the rest.

I can see how it can be perceived as potentially elitist if you put certain countries on top, but it can be more of the product understanding it's market. It knows that one country is going to use it's product more than others. If it decides to expand, I would hope that it would use other potential factors to sort a likely country the user is from to the top as well.

You could also solve the problem a lot smarter by detecting the current locale and using that to determine the suggested option, or even better by using a combo box. It’s really annoying to scroll through more than 5 items in a drop down menu, no matter the content :)

Ranking common countries first only seems like an issue because of our sensitive political climate. Or do you still think it's "perverse and elitist" to put commonly bought bus tickets before more rarely bought options like season tickets in ticket machine menus?

I don't think that's a good analogy. But my comment reads way harsher than I intended it. I've probably done it myself in the past – sticking a handful of key countries at the top of the selector. My point is it isn't good design, it's a lazy hack. And I think if I was a user from one of the 2nd tier countries, I'd find it pretty elitist. The ticket machine analogy doesn't apply.

Why not? It’s not even an analogy, it’s exactly the same hack applied to a different scenario.

It frustrates me too for the same reason, but for many apps the majority of users isn't advanced enough to use keyboard input to navigate dropdowns, so depending on your userbase it might make sense to do it. Especially because with this trick you're already trading the minority's UX for that of the majority anyway.

> It's frustrating and breaks the default means of using a drop-down box.

Which equally gets broken by different ways to write countries:

United States of America (U), America (A)

United Kingdom (U), Great Britian (G), England (E)

Has this occurred at any time since the 90s and if so where

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