[Sigia-l] Year Field: Combo vs. Input Box

[Laurie Gray]

Christopher,

Good topic. Anecdotally, I encountered a site over the weekend that required
me to choose my birth year from a combo box that started with the year 1900
in order to retrieve my password (walgreens.com) I was born in the 60's, so
I had to scroll (and scroll and scroll). There were no keyboard accelerators
I could use that would work gracefully (they all started with "19"). This
method of date entry worked well enough for the month and year because they
were much smaller data sets. In my personal usability opinion, 31-day combo
boxes are rather cumbersome but I think they're pervasive enough that we've
all just learned to deal with them.

If you opt for direct text entry, I can understand that you need to filter
for years older than 1986 but think this can be done from the server side.