The answer is it depends on what you are ordering, it also may depend on where your participant is from, the length of the list.
On the question of ordering by country in our testing that we have done in a remote study of over 100 participants, the findings where always list the countries alphabetically. If you want to be clever place the top 5 countries at the top of the list as well, but make sure that the country is listed alphabetically as well. Less than 5% of your users will look at the top of list. People (at least in Germany/the Netherlands/Spain/UK/Austria/Italy) nearly always look down the list to find their country in its correct alphabetical order. When the country is promoted to the top of the list it adds on average 15 seconds to peoples search time, and can lead to task failure. Listing countries by region also does not work, but leads to a lower failure rate than when the country is listed at the top of list out of alphabetical order. One of the issues we had was on listing countries by region was quite a high percentage of participants where unsure of which region they where in. We did not test with American participants, who may be used to the United States been at the top. Another test we carried out was to help people locate a bus stop using an Ajax drop down. For this list quite a complex scoring system was used for ordering the list. There where different weights for what characters the user had entered, which region we thought the user was in, and popularity of the bus stop. This worked better than a Alphabetical listing. The n on this was about 40. If you want to be more specific on what the list is I will see if we have any findings to share. James http://blog.feralabs.com 2009/2/5 Elizabeth Buie <eb...@luminanze.com> > Jared wrote: > > >You lost me on the distinction between arbitrary and unpredictable. > > Alphabetical is arbitrary in that there is no logic to it; the order of the > letters is an arbitary order that assigns no value or meaning or logic. The > fact that we all use the same arbitrary order is what makes it predictable. > > Elizabeth > > -- > Elizabeth Buie > Luminanze Consulting, LLC > tel +1.301.943.4168 (US) > tel +39.347.394.7022 (Italia) > fax +1.301.949.9694 (US only) > www.luminanze.com > ________________________________________________________________ > 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
