Jeff, We have just done a Remote Usability study where one of the issues was people selecting their country. The system been tested placed the country where it thought the user was from at the top of the drop down list of 195 countries. This is a common pattern with sites in America often listing the United States as the top country in the list.
So for example if the person was from the Netherlands, the Netherlands was placed on the top. Every user still looked all the way down the list and then spent time in puzzlement in why their country was not listed under N. It took a long time for them to find the Netherlands at the top of the list. Even if the user was Austrian it still took the user time to find Austria if it was placed at the top, even though Austria is normally one of the top countries (alphabetically) on the list. We have carried out tests where countries are listed by continent (n=86), again puzzlement, and a high 15%+ failure rate of the user selecting the right country. This last study shows the importance of testing ideas with a target audience from the countries in question (remote is a cheap effective method), because I would believe that an American has become used to United States been listed as the top country but most users from other countries have not got to used to their countries been listed at the top of the drop down box. On a pure GOMS basis getting the user to type in the country would be far more efficient, on a key press count. Maybe the solution is to do an AJAX type auto complete box. With suggestions including the many ways of spelling each country. (eg. Great Britain, United Kingdom, England, Scotland, Alba, Écosse, etc...) An Auto Complete box gets around the issue of ordering by scripts(Latin, Arabic) as the user would have started typing in the script that the listing would order them by. But testing (remote) with a wide selection of the target audience in many parts of the world is imperative because people have got so used to selecting their country from a drop down list. James http://blog.feralabs.com 2008/12/30 Yohan Creemers <yo...@ylab.nl> > Sorry to disappoint you, but I think a dropdown with 195 country names > is the most convenient way to select the country you live in. I > propose to use the official UN list * of ISO 3166-1 country names in > the same language as the rest of the form **, ordered alphabetically. > > > My design consideration is, that this is the most predictable > solution and very accessible. > > A design alternative could be a text box with a smart auto complete > feature that will recognize variations in country names. > > * Depending on your target audience you might want to make a few > political changes in the official UN list. > > ** An alphabetical list of countries by native names will not work, > as there are no rules how to order a list with multiple scripts > (Latin, Arabic) and there are countries with more than one native > name (België, Belgium, Belgien). > > - Yohan > [www.ylab.nl] > > > > . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > Posted from the new ixda.org > http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=36720 > > > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
