Live data from Hacker News

Redesigning the country selector

baymard.com

71–80 of 136 posts

Re: Redesigning the country selector

#71
post #6

On a similar note, I've always found it kind of amusing/frustrating that forms in the US make you fill out city, state, and zip code, when in fact the zip code indicates a specific city and state. I realize that's a huge database of geolocation data to keep as part of the program, but I wonder if there could be some kind of lookup that goes on behind the scenes and fills in the city and state if the response is quick…

Zip codes can and do cross both state and city boundaries in some cases. That's not true of zip+4 but most people don't know their extra 4 digits. Then there is the expected rhythm of filling in the form as city,state,zip so putting zip first throws people off. I did a form once where we put the country above city/state/zip so we could do the wording for those more appropriately (e.g., switch to "postal code") and ev…

You need more foreign testers.

Re: Redesigning the country selector

#72

While this has a nice UI, it suffers from a ranking system that fails to weight prefixes correctly. For those of us in Canada, typing "ca" should probably rank countries that start with the "ca" prefix first, followed by countries that have a word that starts with "ca", finally followed by countries that just happen to contain "ca". I don't see much use in showing "United States" as the first match for a user who has…

That seams as a minor mistake compared to not be able to type the name of the country in my native language. I guess that is not so obvious to the native English speaking users but it's the required feature if you are considering usability improvement as a goal of redesign.

Re: Redesigning the country selector

#74
post #25

Could you retrieve the country from the IP address to set the default?

Doesn't work if you're traveling abroad. I hate getting country-specific versions of a site even after logging in with my US credentials. It should remember that I'm from the US.

You're presenting two different problems really.

1. Yes, sites should remember your personal preferences that you've already set.

2. When setting those preferences, pre-filling based on ip would work in 99.9% of locations. A standard selector can handle everyone else.

Re: Redesigning the country selector

#75
Normal country selector:

Type I, click Ireland (seven or so down).

This: Type I - Ireland not shown.

This is less usable to me than the usual country selector as a result.

Yes, I'm being nitpicky, but all the JS doesn't cover up that it's slower to find my country.

Re: Redesigning the country selector

#76
post #23

While this has a nice UI, it suffers from a ranking system that fails to weight prefixes correctly. For those of us in Canada, typing "ca" should probably rank countries that start with the "ca" prefix first, followed by countries that have a word that starts with "ca", finally followed by countries that just happen to contain "ca". I don't see much use in showing "United States" as the first match for a user who has…

indeed, still doesn't beat typing 'c' 3 times.

That seems odd, I always just type "can".

Re: Redesigning the country selector

#77
post #68
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Population/GDP would be a good starting point, then it'd be nice to adjust weighting automatically over time based on where the site's visitors are coming from (geolocation and previous choices).

This is way too complicated.

Isn't that why we're here? I see no reason why this isn't possible (and as fast and scalable as it might be imagined) given the right serendipity of technology. Now that I think about it, weighting it for a set of countries say on a scale of 0-3 should be fairly easy and would probably fit into the :sort option provided after some tweaking.

Re: Redesigning the country selector

#78
post #64

My main complaint about old country pickers and this one is non-prioritization of countries in the list. Yes, I understand that this may be a sensitive issue, but how much likely your customer is going to be from Canada than from Cameroon. Or if I start typing 'CA' in this selector, I get American Samoa and Antarctica before Canada! Let alone my old acquaintances Cambodia and Cameroon. Same for Russia - you get Aruba…

I think that's making it too hard. Where is this information coming from? How do you update it? Instead, just order the matches like so: 1. Everything that matches at the first word 2. Everything that matches at the start of some word 3. Everything that matches at a non-start position within a word Granted, in this scheme Cameroon will still show up before Canada, but you don't have to look anywhere near as hard to f…

Doesn't mean you can't sub-sort within those categories.

Re: Redesigning the country selector

#80

While this has a nice UI, it suffers from a ranking system that fails to weight prefixes correctly. For those of us in Canada, typing "ca" should probably rank countries that start with the "ca" prefix first, followed by countries that have a word that starts with "ca", finally followed by countries that just happen to contain "ca". I don't see much use in showing "United States" as the first match for a user who has…

That seams as a minor mistake compared to not be able to type the name of the country in my native language. I guess that is not so obvious to the native English speaking users but it's the required feature if you are considering usability improvement as a goal of redesign.

Yes this is missing the oft-overlooked option of synonyms.

There is no reason why the auto-complete cannot have something like this:

     DE
     Germany
     Deutschland
Post reply on HN