The Product Side

Sort this list, please.

Here we go. Over and over again.

Imagine you want to work as a delivery guy for this company and you are asked to select the area you will service. Then, look at the screenshot above (apologies to non-Greek speaking readers, but I am sure you still get the point).

How, on earth, are you going to find the area you are looking for? You have to read each entry, one by one, until you find the right one. There is no discernible logical grouping or ordering of the entries, it’s just the order they were retrieved from the database. This list box does not even let you write inside it and automatically filter the results.

And in this particular case, it is relatively easy to find the proper entry. I’ve seen this happen with combo-boxes containing more than 1000 entries.

Let’s not forget tabular data, too. Quite often, we are presented with tables with plenty of rows and without any type of ordering. Some of them do not even let the user click on the column header to sort by this column.

This is the most common omission I consistently see in UX, ever since I started writing code in 1993. And I believe the main reason it occurs is because people who create the S/W don’t bother to use it, the same way the actual user would. It’s not the technical challenge of sorting (in most cases). It is the lack of empathy for the end user.

So, this is my kind request to everyone designing & developing S/W (developers, testers, analysts, designers): sort this list, please.

Come on, guys . How hard can it be?