Comments on MXUnit Blog: Dropdowns: The Scourge

Very cool, Tink. Thanks! I'll keep that one in...

2010-02-23T10:29:07.470-05:00

Very cool, Tink. Thanks! I'll keep that one in my toolbox, as I hope to be doing more Flex in the future

I know this post talks of HTML but if your looking...

2010-02-23T09:58:57.374-05:00

I know this post talks of HTML but if your looking for this filtered functionality in Flex you may find this useful

http://www.tink.ws/blog/filtercombobox/

@Allen, great point. Back in the "old days&qu...

2010-02-21T19:21:47.700-05:00

@Allen, great point. Back in the "old days" when Autosuggest / filters were just making their way into websites, they were all about "the first few characters".

They've come a long way since then. I'm a fan of the jquery Autocomplete plugin, and it behaves "correctly", in that it performs a substring match, not a startstring match.

I've updated the original blog post to point this out as a feature of Mint's autocomplete (down toward the bottom).

Thanks for the comment.

Overall I agree but we have to remember that "...

2010-02-20T23:36:14.926-05:00

Overall I agree but we have to remember that "solutions" such as letting the user type to filter doesn't necessarily help either. Different people remember things in different ways. For example, the other day I went to listen to my Roling Stones playlist on m MP3 player but it wasn't there. Well, a few days later, duh, it was. Only I should've been looking for "The Rolling Stones" instead of "Rolling Stones".

So it's not just about giving our users tools to filter but giving them tools for the information to show up the way they think, not how we as developers think.

Great post! I really hate long dropdowns where I ...

2010-02-20T06:58:29.791-05:00

Great post! I really hate long dropdowns where I have to scroll down forever. This is useful for us developers to keep in mind.

great post, marc. i love it! thinking about a litt...

2010-02-20T06:00:03.375-05:00

great post, marc. i love it! thinking about a little deeper, for me, it comes down to 2 or 3 challenges in usability. 1. clicking and scrolling, 2. aiming the mouse pointer at a very small area on the screen, and 3. displaying lots of expanding information in a small visual space. scrolling is a pain. the "aim and click" problem is just plain wrong - you know, when you miss that every-shrinking thumb by accident, you once again have to click the widget, and start scrolling yet again. developers should not require users to be mouse cursor sharpshooters. at least with typing (which is still a primitive HCI, imo) and doing some kind of search, we have a better idea of what the user is looking for. the mouse is dumb and doesn't convey much of the user's intent - it only says, "I clicked on this x,y coordinate". combine that with a dumb widget and you get dumb and dumber.

bill

LOL Very nice post. Love the naming of your images...

2010-02-19T17:51:38.860-05:00

LOL Very nice post. Love the naming of your images!

drop downs = t3h suck.

@Grant, thanks for the feedback! @Dan, thanks for...

2010-02-19T12:53:21.051-05:00

@Grant, thanks for the feedback!

@Dan, thanks for the link. I'ma check it out now

A while back, I wrote a jQuery plug-in with simila...

2010-02-19T11:01:56.824-05:00

A while back, I wrote a jQuery plug-in with similar functionality:

http://www.givainc.com/labs/mcdropdown_jquery_plugin.htm

It allows for nested categories and typing to automatically filter the results.

We have an application that can get very big, very quickly, so we needed a way to better handle how users are able to select the options.

Great post! While reading, I couldn't help but...

2010-02-19T09:37:52.104-05:00

Great post! While reading, I couldn't help but laugh as this is a topic that my boss brings up regularly. Daily! He hates drop-downs more than anyone I know. I agree with you, HTML dropdowns suck.