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There's one inconvenience with country names with non ASCII-7 characters: country drop-down lists. They are so long you almost always start typing the name firs
by mojuba 4y ago
There's one inconvenience with country names with non ASCII-7 characters: country drop-down lists. They are so long you almost always start typing the name first. If you are looking for, say, a hotel in Turkey (now Turkiye) you don't necessarily have the keyboard layout to readily type ü.
In fact country lists are probably one of the most annoying unsolved problems in UI to date. Especially where you are asked for your phone number and the country code is a drop-down. Seriously, how is finding an item in a 200+ list easier than typing 1-3 digits? And especially if the web site is in a foreign language and you don't even know what your country is called in that language? (Been in this situation in France once, had to urgently sign up on a web site with my UK phone number that I had at the time, ended up googling what the UK is called in French just because the web site required my phone number!)
- Fatnino 4y agoCountry drop downs have many low hanging improvements possible but nobody seems to do them. For example: put the 4-5 most populous countries at the top of the list. Or: make an effort to guess what country the user is from and float that to the top. Instead I'm usually left to scroll down to the 'U's and I always overshoot.
- mojuba 4y agoHere is another: just a text box where you start typing in any language, whatever character set/keyboard Latin or not, and it brings you the closest matches. You don't need to see the full list of countries just to select one of them. A menu with 200+ items (let alone localization problems) is just so anti-UI, how come we accepted this as a norm?
- Tagbert 4y agoMost of those lists do jump to the matching names as you type.
- bmn__ 4y ago> If you are looking for, say, a hotel in Turkey (oops, Turkiye) you don't necessarily have the keyboard layout to readily type ü. This falls into the realm of imagined problems. One can simply type `u` and skip backward 3 items (Uganda → Tuvalu → Turkmenistan).
- my69thaccount 4y agoThat is an imagined solution. I would have not bothered with that at all.
- bmn__ 4y agoThe premise of using the keyboard to jump to an entry was already a given. I don't understand what motivates your reply.
- sebazzz 4y agoDepending on the database server used and if database-level filtering is used, this isn't a problem at all. In some collations "u" is equal to "ü" in filtering and sorting.
- rerx 4y agoParticular annoying are localized, originally English drop-down menus, where they translated the items, but did not update the alphabetical ordering. Quite confusing until you realize that you have to scroll much further than Denmark to find Germany, even though they would be next to each other in the language they are using.
- yread 4y agoWait until you have to find Netherlands. Is it The Netherlands or Holland (or Pays-Bas for Air France)
- inglor_cz 4y agoYeah, Česká republika (the Czech Republic) is usually located after Zimbabwe.
- netsharc 4y agoAlso, is it the UK, United Kingdom, Great Britain, or even "England" in the local language?
- SAI_Peregrinus 4y agoEngland is a country within the United Kingdom located mostly on the island Great Britain within the British Isles. So it depends on which of those things you refer to. Great Britain isn't a country, the UK is a nation composed of 4 countries, England is one of those 4.
- netsharc 4y agoYeah thanks, I know of all that. But people implementing country dropdowns might be funny...
- SAI_Peregrinus 4y agoLots of people are ignorant of all sorts of things. The relationships of the former members of the (former) British Empire are particularly complex. Languages aren't countries. Geographic locations aren't necessarily parts of a single country (contested territories are a thing), and immigrants to one location may not read/write the language of the location they live in. ISO 639-3[1] is language codes, and they are NOT ISO 3166 [2] country codes. There are fewer country codes than language codes, which tempts lazy people to use country codes for language dropdowns. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Languages/List_of_ISO_639-3_language_codes_(2019) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Language... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_3166_country_codes
- Zach_the_Lizard 4y agoOk. What about Derry vs. Londonderry? Not being Irish, it seems both refer to the same place, but there is an Irish nationalist or unionist political statement being made when choosing one or the other, so one could be looking for one of these names and not find it, depending on what website you're using. Both are arguably "native" names. The Netherlands vs. Netherlands vs. Netherlands, The.