“Choose your Country” widgets
Tiffany and Co wants me to tell them which country I’m from:
UPS who can get items to my door overnight can’t figure it out:
Wikipedia doesn’t know what country I am from and what language should be used there.
Fedex also likes to waste time, and look ugly doing it.
Siemens is a tech leader, but not a global usability leader.
As you can see, big international companies with web presence divided by geographic location seem to prefer these “choose a country” drop down lists over automatically detecting the user’s country from their IP address (IBM and GE are two good examples that do it right). Therefore, I call for an immediate ban of such lists. Any company with a select your country drop down list is a company that doesn’t understand the web and IT. Something that can be trivially automated to remove a step in the user’s workflow should always be automated. For example, let me remodel Tiffany & Co’s website widget:
I’ve removed any options, allowed the user to change his country, and automatically detected it. A slight gradient improves text legibility. Every company should replace their country drop downs with little boxes like this. There is no excuse.
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 19th, 2006 at 3:13 pm and is tagged with tiffany and co, tiffany co, little boxes, web presence, legibility, geographic location, drop down list, widget, widgets, gradient, fedex, wikipedia, ups, workflow, usability, excuse, siemens, ip address. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
on March 19th, 2006 at 4:46 pm
A few notes worthwhile:
IPs are not always assigned geographically. More than once my IP was traced to somewhere in the NY area although I leava in Vancouver, Canada. It depends who buys IP blocks from whom and so on, so forth.
I see no reason why Wikipedia would modify that page. They are asking you about your desired language, not location. I can read texts in a few languages [and so can you, I take it] and maybe it’s nice to be given that option sometimes. There are other issues as well like proxies and public access sites.
Cheers!
on March 19th, 2006 at 5:56 pm
inaequitas made all my points.
- IPs aren’t always Geo based
- Wikipedia is an encyclopeida. You can choose to read it in whatever language you want. They’ve got the right idea going by having the larger versions of the wiki on the front page.
- proxies would throw off anything geo based
- what about people traveling? Say you went to Les Blogs or some conference in France, then all these sites mentioned were all of the sudden in French. Not so great.
however, an alternative solution wasn’t provided.
I think that the drop down menus are a start. They should be dynamic and responsive to IP, letters on the keyboard, etc.
Many drop down country menus will simply list the United States as the top one, and then the rest will be in alphabetical order. I think this top ‘place’ should be based off IP.
But you are right that a great deal of time is wasted scrolling through hundreds of countries trying to find the one you want, and that there is a solution out there just waiting to be made.
on March 19th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
You’re all wrong! IPs vary, but generally you can guess at the country from one, which is good enough. All you need to provide is an option to change, and you’re done. Also, browsers send a language header, so you can autodetect that if you’re more interested in language than country.
on March 20th, 2006 at 10:25 am
Having your country automatically detected definetly would be convienient - I have noticed many sites giving it a go, though I do find it annoying when E-Bay.co.uk asks me to try my “local” version of the site - located on the other side of the ocean. IBM got it wrong too from my home PC (I was behind a proxy when e-bay tried to re-direct me). That said, having one set and then giving me the list like IBM does is a good stab at solving the problem.
I agree that Wikipedia is probably best offering up the popular languages on the frontpage. Given the fact your not ordering stuff from wikipedia or doing anything where the region is important, Wikipedia’s layout does make sense.
What Daniel said about dropdown menus is true - they generally do list the US first and then the rest of the world in alphabetical order - they should either put where ever the webpage guesses the person to be or put a couple of the most popular choices first and then the rest in alphabetical order. Not doing so just makes the rest of the world think webmasters are ignorant of their exsistance (to a degree).
on March 20th, 2006 at 10:47 pm
IPs are really accurate, but I’ve seen them fail… especially in South America, were some blocks are owned by American companies. They don’t always show right… a default by IP will work 90% of the time, but you need to allow them to rectify.
Man, btw, you need to fix your comments pod for Firefox … I hate switching to IE every time I want to comment. Firefox will preview, but the submit button does not work.
Cheers mate.
on April 5th, 2006 at 5:19 pm
Your approach is too short sighted.
What if you are French, but on vacation in Hong Kong. You want to check your Goldman Sachs stock portfolio, so you go to www.gs.com, and are immediately switched to the Hong Kong site. How irritating would that be?
When clients ask for an IP based site selection, I advise them to avoid it and use a country selector instead, for the reason described above.
Travel the world a little.
on April 8th, 2006 at 5:11 am
hmm, I agree that they should use the automatic ip detection even though most of the times these scripts don’t really work and help to pinpoint the location (i’m a prime example sometimes when google think i’m in hongkong or someplace).
However, an easy and convenient area that allows for a change in location, as your diagram shows, is trully a better good way, or atleast show the ip location at the top.
I wonder if there’s a way to detect it through set variables in the browser. that would be an interesting thing to see.
on August 13th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
Hi guys,
I’m new to this forum and I just stumbled across your discussion the other day. It got me thinking; is there anyway you can “fool the system”? It may sound on the edge of the law but the thing is that I have been listening to this webradio for some time now. KIIS FM in LA, a very nice station if you ask me, the problem is that they have blocked the webradio for all non-US users, and I live in sweden!
I think you realise my problem, is there anything I can do about this problem of mine?
Thanks!
//Niklas
on November 8th, 2006 at 10:42 pm
First off, let me say that this topic is very interesting.
Automatic IP detection is in fact now commonly used by different websites in different ways (I know you all know), either for language or region. Let say for example, when I type ‘www.google.com’ on my address bar, I am automatically redirected to ‘www.google.com.ph’ where the language is local as well. And then an option to go back to ‘English’. In some sites I visited, the approach is different. They use ‘English’ as default language and region and an option to use the detected region and language as default.
Either way is convinient but one could be more useful…