Should i use drop down menu

But if the answer need more attention do it in radio buttons. Jamie, Baymard Institute August 17, Sascha Yes, using geo-targeting to auto-select the right country is actually another guideline in our report. Kishore Very true. Our article is meant as a guideline, not a strict rule. As with any other design decision, you should always take the context into consideration.

Bennett McElwee If you do use forms for viewing data, this is a great insight. This goes for all design guidelines. Richard BF September 29, SandyS November 14, Kestrel Blackmore November 23, Even with caching it was unsatisfactory. Kris November 27, Very thoughtful idea. I really appreciate your effects. I have read few comments about the ip config, without selecting the country select. I am working a ecommer website which we have more than countries.

Suppose if US user enters different country and try to order a product from our site, the ip config wont work, thought they still clear the cookies it shows only ip selected country. Just a thought. Marc December 1, I took the time to consider all the user actions in a recent project and found that dropdown menus were quite a clumsy user experience. Jamie December 6, Normally I just type the first few letters and was moved to that part of the list. I would agree that without this functionality, this would be very problematic.

Fernando February 11, Kevin April 20, Christian, Baymard Institute June 4, Kevin August 6, Nathan S January 21, What would be your suggestion for a Date Of Birth entry on mobile? Is a text entry field a better user experience in that instance? Miked February 21, Series of drop-downs where there are more than 15 items, i.

Text field with auto-complete if more than 15 items the user must obviously know what they are looking for in this case. UX O2 August 7, One that is a required field,in a data entry form used by Admins for data entry. Matto November 11, UX O2 we are struggling with the long list issue. We are currently designing a mobile application for smart phones. On particularly long lists that a user is required to select, We are thinking of displaying the top 15 items based on usage data in the database for the last couple of months.

Elibeth Scott November 18, Alicia Stark December 10, I guess I stumbled upon great content. Pablo March 6, On desktops and mobile devices with physical keyboards not too sure about iOS though , you can always press an alphabetical key and you can scroll faster for each word.

This of course finds the first letter of each word. I think a combination of what you said a auto-complete with the dropdown would be better. Niblits April 22, Pablo — not every site or program allows the user to filter by typing the first few characters. The ones that do are quite helpful. Andrew July 1, No mention or discussion of whether to order chronologically or by perceived relevance?

For example, a product list of 14 products…. Ben Moore no website October 23, Website design is not my world, and no one will see this comment five years after the article was written, but reading it was extremely satisfying. State drop-down lists are ubiquitous, and when I las checked there were more than 15 US states. There are about countries on this planet. What will the list become when it includes every state, province, prefecture, department, county, municipality, territory and whatever from every country?

An oblast from the past. Chin Bawambi February 29, Just about to design a website and this is making me rethink the interface. I was planning on drop-down entry for darts match entry but radio button mixed with drop-downs would be more-user friendly. Marilyn June 28, No one seems to explain why we must use dropdown lists of state names when ordering online. What is the point? Nick January 31, Thank you so much for sharing your finding.

Andrew Chalk October 20, I had preliminarily decided to use buttons arranged like tiles, each with the name of one choice. They would change color when selected. Two pros with this were: 1 The user could see the whole set of choices and which ones had been chosen; 2 I know as I work on this project that the number of choices will increase each year by maybe choices.

This form can easily accommodate that;. Another constraint advantage is that the user will be using a desktop monitor, not a phone or a watch, etc. In fact, the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines explicitly recommends to not use dropdown menus for commands. Dropdowns do have their advantages. First, they conserve screen space. Because they are a standard widget even if an unpleasant one , users know how to deal with them.

And, when used in forms and for attribute selection, dropdown boxes prevent users from entering erroneous data, since they only show legal choices. Despite these advantages, web usability would increase if designers used dropdowns less often. To that end, here are some design guidelines for dropdowns:. If disabled items are removed, the interface loses spatial consistency and becomes harder to learn.

Resist the temptation to include many items whenever possible. If you have many items, consider alternative ways of presenting them — such as HTML lists of traditional links or mega menus , which are two dimensional instead of linear and offer easier mouse management and also faster average reach time to items inside.

These alternative options will alleviate some of the problems caused by long dropdown lists, and also improve accessibly for blind users. A while back, as part of a presentation on web-usability methods, we ran a small user test for the audience. When completing a registration page, our test participant had to enter her address on a form with a text field for the name of the street but a dropdown menu for the type of street Avenue , Boulevard , Court , Drive , and so on.

Guess what? Not making your web page mobile-friendly is one of the biggest mistakes in website design. Accessing a drop-down menu can often be difficult on a computer. Because menus are designed to open when the mouse hovers over the menu, one wrong move of the mouse could completely close the menu, forcing the user to start over. This is a frustrating but common issue with drop-down menu navigation, making it hard for users to click on the link they want on the first try.

This problem increases on a mobile device. Touch screens rely on finger swipes and taps, which do not work well with roll-over style drop-down menus.

You can design a specific mobile version of your business web page, but it is often easier to design your site with both computer and mobile needs in mind. If your website contains a lot of information and pages, drop-down menus can become large and unwieldy. With small amounts of information, a drop-down menu can provide a clean and obvious navigation for users.

However, as you add more information, and therefore more menus and sub menus, this can become overwhelming for the user. While it may be obvious to you where various topics fall in the hierarchy, your customers may have to scroll through several large menus and lists to find the information they need. Larger menus can also cause problems for computer and mobile users alike. As the menus become larger, they may not fit on a single screen, even on a larger computer monitor.

This is very frustrating for users who may not be able to access the links that are off their screen. In recent years, a new drop-down navigation technique has been used; it is called the mega menu. It is basically a menu that displays all of the menu options for a particular drop-down in one large menu instead of a narrow, single level drop-down.

We placed an example of a mega menu is below. For Wordpress, we highly recommend using a plugin-in called Ubermenu.