Comments on: A Revised Country Drop-down List

By: RedEldorado

RedEldorado — Sun, 10 May 2009 21:04:56 +0000

Your article is food-for-thought. Aspects of it do have merit, especially the Cambodia before Canada situation. I decided to list the following countries first, (United States, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, United Kingdom), followed by (most of) the entire list of countries listed alphabetically. I believe most of my customers will be from the United States, thus my decision to place U.S. first. Thanks.

By: gt456

gt456 — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:45:40 +0000

Very confused list. Users will be in lost and have to waste some time to understand how the list is arranged. So, actually it is not doing any good.

By: Brendon J. Wilson

Brendon J. Wilson — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:22:17 +0000

I think the main reason is really consistency – the application may need to make decisions based on country (and possibly state, province, or region) and thus needs to be able to reliably determine which country the user is in. If the form is free-form, then there’s an additional dimension of freedom for the user that results in major overhead for the programmer.

For example, let’s say you need to determine shipping charges, and hence need to know if something is a domestic or international destination. If the country entry is free-form text, your application will need to know that “United Kingdom”, “UK”, “U.K.”, “Untied Kindom” are all mean to be interpreted as “United Kingdom”.

A drop-down avoids this uncertainty, and also eliminates user frustration (“I’m sorry Dave, I can’t ship to ‘Untied Kindom’”).

By: Joe Butler

Joe Butler — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:01:39 +0000

Why do we even need a drop down for country?

What is wrong with people typing in their country, just as they type in their town, or street address.

Can someone please explain what I cannot see?

I’ve just had a customer saying that she didn’t know what to type for her country (United Kingdom) in an address form I did, because it was not a drop down list, but a free-form text entry? Is this the reason: because people are used to dropdowns and cannot handle anything different?

By: Brendon J. Wilson

Brendon J. Wilson — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:48:11 +0000

@CyberT: Agreed, on reflection the original approach is anti-user; however, I like the approach that Google Analytics takes (see above) – it’s a bit of a hybrid. It’s still alphabetical, but it takes into account the markets their product is serving – a better solution than a purely alphabetical list, which is also anti-user (in my opinion).

By: CyberT

CyberT — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 06:59:09 +0000

Your list makes the assumption that the user knows that they may use a keyboard shortcut to jump to positions in the list. Other wise, it just looks unordered and confusing. Sorry, this is bad UI as its targeted at an already technically adept audience. An alphabetical list whislt mildly annoying for the g33ks and their shortcuts is accessibly to everyone.

By: Ken Welsby

Ken Welsby — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 10:15:50 +0000

Just caught up with this, chaps because I’m specifying it for our new e-biz.s platform. We’re starting the list with the 10 most frequent customer origins, which are the same for both travel trade customers and independent web visits – according to our analytics – and then going into the full alphabetical list. Living in the United Kingdom – which has millions of web users and e-commerce customers – I am always irritated by companies who make me roll through dozens of countries which combined have less spending power than we do.

By: Brendon J. Wilson

Brendon J. Wilson — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 03:43:40 +0000

Turns out I’m not crazy – if you look at Google Analytics’ sign-up process, their drop down has the following countries at the top of the list (in this order): United States, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan. It then continues in similar fashion, listing only the one or two biggest markets for the company in alphabetical order, before listing the remaining countries in purely alphabetical order.

It’s a nice compromise, and solves the problem nicely.

By: Simple Guy

Simple Guy — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:57:52 +0000

I stumbled upon this article when I was hunting for a list of countries to populate for the “Country Dropdown List” for my new new website. The target audience is USA & Canada and if I stretch it a bit, the Western European countries and some of the more Internet savvy countries.

I have decided to take a stand and *not* be politically correct by listing each and every country where as my website is not even intended for users from those countries.

I am going to prune the list down to not include countries that are not the target audience for the moment.

By: Brendon J. Wilson

Brendon J. Wilson — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 22:08:46 +0000

What I think is that a purely alphabetical ordering makes absolutely no sense when half the countries on the list have little or no Internet access, represent a trivially small percentage of the traffic on the Internet, or are highly unlikely to be purchasing goods from these web sites.

Agreed it’s not the best way, but the group already identified a half dozen others. Ideally, you’d use something like OpenID to handle authentication, and you’d never have to deal with entering this detail on a web site ever again.

And yes, I do spend too much time online.