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Comment by Domenic_S | Hacker News Reader

Here's one he missed: your "country" dropdown has a list of every country in existence, alphabetically. So for the US you have to scroll down to near the end of the list past hundreds of other countries.

Instead, put your audience up top (Canada, US, GB maybe) and then alphabetically list the rest.

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I've gotten good use out of this script: http://baymard.com/labs/country-selector

Populate it with the data on names and alternates and priority, and it knows gets you to a short list with "un" (with "United States" first), while also offering Germany for "deu" or the United Kingdom for "bri".

It solved so many hassles for a client's internal online ordering system. Beautiful work, really.

Actually the solution you're suggesting is one of my pet hates. An alphabetical list of countries should be alphabetical! If you put some countries out of order you just make it more difficult for people to find their country if theirs isn't the one pre-selected.

If your audience is mainly US, then by all means pre-select the US, but keep the list alphabetical. If your audience isn't mainly in one country, either don't select anything, or for extra bonus points, do a Geo IP lookup and pre-select the country they're in.

I think one of the worst things I've seen is the State/Province version of this. I try to scroll down to "B" for "British Columbia" but lo and behold, there's nothing listed between Arkansas and California. I double-check the country dropdown... still says Canada. Yeah, the genius web developer decided to list all 50 US states before the Canadian provinces, regardless of what country was selected.

I've also found it helps to use a divider to separate your audience section from the rest. If you just lump them together with US at the top you're more likely to get grumblings about "US-centric" this or that, but the divider helps communicate "this is our expected audience and we're making it easier for them, but we're inclusive of everyone else below as well".

You can press U to skip to the Us.

I love that trick. I often try to type more, but since "USA", "U.S.A." and "United States" are all different it often ends up backfiring. It's eally minor in the grand-scheme of things, but it often makes me feel unlucky for guessing incorrectly!

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