We're asking for the user's birhtday in our profile editor, and are currently discussing if we should use
a) dropdowns for day, month and year b) text fields for day, month and year c) one free text field The advantages as we see it for b and c are - the user is in typing mode, and in most cases a dropdown would mean switching from keyboard to mouse - text fields resemble natural language more than a dropdown Disadvantages would be - higher requirements for form validation - the user will be able to provoke a (validation) error, and that is just bad Poka Yoke (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke) Personally, I see UI heading towards a conversational paradigm that resembles a real-life situation with all its self-correctingness. That would call for solution c with proper parsing and validation. I wrote a bit about that subject here http://blog.genstart.dk/2008/11/25/what-would-reality-do/ ________________________________________________________________ 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
