Earlier quoted context omitted.
indeed, still doesn't beat typing 'c' 3 times.
I actually laughed at this. It's a total Canandian "in joke"
It also works for Connecticut on state selections!
Redesigning the country selector
61–70 of 136 posts
Re: Redesigning the country selector
#62Sorry to say - but it sucks. Completely irrelevant results, strange sort order.
In any standard dropdown list, just press a button and it scrolls to the first word starting with it. Press again, etc, and it cycles.
Fuzzy string search is a good algo and all, but does not make a good country selector. Everyone knows first letter of a country, so keep it simple. And, see SublimeText for an excellent example of fuzzy string searching.
Re: Redesigning the country selector
#63your selector just sucks. admit it.
Re: Redesigning the country selector
#64My 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 find it. I doubt anyone would notice/care about your "non-PC rating scheme", but I do know it would be a much bigger pain in the ass to maintain.
Re: Redesigning the country selector
#65Something that always bothers me about "Select redesigns" is that scrolling does not work like it should. If you move your mouse outside of the div/whatever, it'll scroll the page instead of the select. A regular select will keep scrolling until it reaches the end, then it'll scroll the page.
Re: Redesigning the country selector
#66I don't start typing the letters inside of a word to try to get the word in autocomplete.
Re: Redesigning the country selector
#67Re: Redesigning the country selector
#68My 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…
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.
Re: Redesigning the country selector
#69Why don't country selectors use the free IP databases to pre-fill the country? It would reduce 90% of user input.
After that just tally a daily table of "INSERT INTO country_order (count,country) FROM (SELECT count(*),country from users)" and then do: "SELECT country FROM (((SELECT TOP 10 count,country FROM country_order order by count) UNION (SELECT 0 as count, country from country_order)) GROUP BY country) ORDER BY sum(count), country"
That should produce a country listing where the TOP 10 countries are ordered by their use and the rest are sorted alphabetically. The SQL might not be perfect but you get the idea.
Re: Redesigning the country selector
#70On 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.