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Re: Datepicker questions - are they useful?

for

From: _mallory
Date: Nov 2, 2015 6:15AM

On Mon, Nov 02, 2015 at 07:56:46AM -0500, Mary Elizabeth Sullivan wrote:
>
> - is a sequence of drop downs better?

This is the only one I can really reply to, though I also personally
dislike graphical date pickers (mostly because everything's too small
and hard to choose, though I do like *seeing* the dates on a
calendar), and that is:
please check and user-test and check again if you go for the multi-
dropdown route. It's physically very easy to screw these up as a user
since your focus stays on the input while you may now think you've
switched to scrolling the page. Gov.uk should have some statistics
on this as I recall Anna Bartlett? giving a talk about all the problems
they've seen with select tags.

There's also the issue of having three inputs for what mentally we
consider a single value, the date. Using dropdowns is simply easier
for the back-end to check validity, but I can't say they're an
improvement for the front-end.

_mallory