Sucky Usability of Country Pickers

Recently, I had to rework a submission form which had a country picker—the kind you see on almost every e-commerce site. Besides the traditional long list of countries, the old picker attempted to be smart by also listing regions / prefectures / states / provinces.

County pickers are one of those usability monstrosities with dot-com legacy which developers drag around simply out of habit.

First, do you really want to be an arbiter of how many countries exist at any given time? Which former “people’s republics” can be confidently called “countries” this year? How about next year? There’s absolutely no way to be politically correct about it. Nobody ever goes back to update country lists (since they are stolen from other scripting sites in the first place). There’s a good chance that you’ll piss off someone by referring to their country by an old name or commit the sin of omission.

The region, state and province business is even trickier. In light of the recent war between Georgia and Russia, would you dare to decide which country South Osetia belongs to? What about some of the “territories”: do you want to decide if they are countries in their own right or somebody’s fiefs? Then why play these games in the first place?

I believe the best approach is to give users a free-form edit box. It’s pretty safe to say they know where they live and can intelligently type in their own country name.

When it comes to improving usability, it’s better to put end-users in charge and get out of the way (credit card numbers are one such example).

I totally agree!

I do however make smart dropdowns for American states and Canadian provinces. Mostly as a convenience for the demographic that is frequenting the site that I develop.

I've always thought of creating a REST API for this stuff but eventually came to the conclusion that was probably over engineering the problem.

The other issue I think has to do reporting data. If I provide a free form textbox for people to enter a province, I don't want to have to search the database for BC, B.C. and British Columbia to aggregate tuples grouped by a province.

It's interesting how this issue is ubiquitous around the web but doesn't seem to be completely solved.