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September 29, 2006

Intelligent Metadata

What the most annoying think about online forms? It is the silly use of dropdowns for state and country codes. From the programmer perspective, this is a great idea since we are limiting the domain of choices for the end user and ensuring data quality. Well, we keep telling ourselves that anyway. Dropdown are great for those that live in Alabama and Alaska but not for Utah and Vermont. Yes, you can type the first letter and jump to the first state which is great for Georgia but crappy for Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, and North Dakota.

It get worse for country domains; Albania and Aruba are the fortunate ones. United State is near the bottom, right next to the United Kingdom and United Emirates. Don’t get into a hurry or your package will be sent to Victoria Station in London.

Why can’t we have open text fields that have some intelligence in them? If I order a product to be sent to Atlanta, HI with zipcode 30308 then clearly I mistyped the state code. That could be automatically corrected and presented to the user for confirmation. Computers are getting fast enough to be able to handle this type of transaction, it is we the designers that are the problem.

Posted by Todd at September 29, 2006 1:49 PM