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Comment by culi | Hacker News Reader

As pointed out in the post, it's pretty easy to switch between years. It's mostly a matter of it being unintuitive. Unfortunately this isn't at all unique to Safari. See this comparison of implementations:

https://wd.imgix.net/image/vvhSqZboQoZZN9wBvoXq72wzGAf1/uh0U...

From left to right: Chrome desktop, Chrome mobile, Safari desktop, Safari mobile, and Firefox desktop

I think at minimum they could've chosen 1980 or something as a default. 0% of their users were born today so not setting a default makes no sense

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Since when would arbitrarily setting the default to the 80s and reducing the amount of needed clicks from 925 to 465 even be a suggestion?

We're actually expecting users to follow through on that?

No I wasn't suggesting it was the solution. Just a bare minimum. 0% of their users are born today. 100% are likely born with 30 years of 1980

Yes I agree, that ideally the users would find it more obvious how to use the date picker properly and not just tap the left and right arrow to navigate

However in the screenshot I posted, I don't think any of the solutions have made this functionality very obvious. Except maybe Firefox lol. But Chrome's implementation on mobile seems even worse than Safari's!

What would you propose as a solution?

Type in your own date as an immediate replacement. (Use separate dropdowns?)

400+ clicks isn't even a bare minimum. It should be considered broken and tossed out right away.

Not the parent but the answer is don't use the date picker at all for date of birth. The gov.uk site, which is generally held up as an example of best practice design and accessibility because they do over the shoulder testing on real devices with real users from different backgrounds advises to just use three text field with the number property.

https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2013/12/05/asking-for-a-date...

Indeed, here's their date component:

https://design-system.service.gov.uk/components/date-input/

(unlike the blog post, it uses actual Day Month Year labels rather than placeholders)

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