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Re: Forms - 1 label for 2 selects?

for

From: Chris Heilmann
Date: Aug 6, 2004 6:31AM


>> If you read "Defensive Design for the Web"
>> by 37 Signals, they actually recommend using drop-downs for
>> date-selection, for the simple reason that it restricts what values can
>> be entered, and thus frustrates the user less.
>
> That's normally bogus. It is surely more frustrating to have to make three
> selections (day, month, year) from dropdown lists, which might be quite
> long, than to type in a date.

In the case of day month and year this does not hold up at all, as a
dropdown would allow me to choose the 31. of February, unless some client
side script tells me not to do that - which can be even more frustrating
than a page reload. A lot of software vendors advocate immediate
verification and error reporting via onchange handlers and alerts/popups
as a usability enhancement, but most of our testing proved that people are
annoyed by that.

--
Chris Heilmann
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Learn to let go! http://ltlg.icant.co.uk
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