Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

The UI pattern is still stupid. You should be able to quickly enter forms like this on a keyboard.

When I look for a part for my car, I pick “Honda”, “Model Year”, “model”, “trim”.

With address forms, if I type “U” in a keyboard aware field, it defaults to “US Minor Outlying Islands”. Places that try to accommodate will put the US and Canada first.

If you asked country, first, you could utilize the postcode method. Some sites try to autocomplete street address which I personally find annoying as my street is a common streetname.

View on HN

Being from the England is even worse, 'Country' could be any of the following:

United Kingdom

Great Britain

Britain

England

Meanwhile, here in Bristol, a whole bunch of sites insist on using a drop down for the county and list "Avon" which doesn't even exist. It should be Bristol or possibly City of Bristol.

I think the county list is set in stone because Royal Mail refuses to update them (for some idiotic reason they still control the postcode database, which I guess lots of websites use and therefore use the old county names / boundaries). For example, it's still Humberside, even though that hasn't existed for decades.

Yep, I recall that Royal Mail is one of the websites that has the "Avon" issue. I don't know why they don't just update it to make it accurate as they update their PAF files for postcode lookups every three months with new postcodes. "Avon" is strange as it's still used in some contexts, such as the police force is known as Avon & Somerset

Small distraction, entering the year first is preferred for vehicles, as manufacturers changed names (Nissan/Datsun) or were discontinued (Saturn, Pontiac) after known years.

A tangent, but I've always wondered what is the most efficient way to order the drop-down menus for year, make and model. Assuming your a retailer for hard to find car parts, e.g. rockauto, how do you order those menus such that someone has to do the least amount of scrolling? Year cuts down a number of defunct or newer manufacturers but Make cuts down the number of years for that same group.

I went year-make-model many years ago when I did an autoglass website.

The filtering value is big as you said, and the model year as a first filter is easy to type in, and probably gets you reasonably close if you're off-by-one. Accidentally picking an '05 Sonata instead of an '04 probably has similar parts, but if you pick Honda instead of Hyundai, you're way off in Wonderland.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com