In some cases, I would recommend not going strictly alphabetical, because it biases away from the majority of your users.
Our product's sign up page includes a popup for State, which includes US protectorates like Guam. Unfortunately, alphabetically, Federated States of Micronesia precedes Florid, and Palau comes before Pennsylvania. So users who alphakey to their state end up with a big What The F---? Do we have *any* users from Palau in our system? Heck if I know, but I'll bet it's way fewer than from Wilkes-Barre. So by including this oddity alphabetically in our list -- rather than somewhere else -- we serve the one user from there and abuse the thousands from somewhere more common. The same thing applies on a global basis. If 90% of your projected users are from English speaking countries, move them to the start of their letters of the alphabet. Make things easy for the huge bulk of users, maybe confusing for a small number of them, and slightly worse for the tiny portion who don't get true logical alphakeying (like the huge contingent from Uganda who are going to be soooo angry that United States came up on the first U! [*]). "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Consistency is great, but if there's a good reason to be inconsistent, go for it. -- Jim Drew Seattle, WA [*] - Apologies to anyone from Uganda. Only an example, recommending for a case where Ugandans are not anticipated to be a meaningful fraction of site traffic. Where you draw the line of what is significant enough to jog out of consistency, I don't know. Should Arizona come before Alaska, purely on population grounds dictating likelihood of users? -----Original Message----- >From: Bryan Minihan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >I can't tell you how many times I've had to build a country drop-down, and >I've come to prefer "most likely selection first, with alphabetical >following". For a truly global company/site where people are likely to be >from everywhere (and/or you don't want to show bias toward a particular >country), I'd probably go with pure alphabetical. ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
