When designing a form to collect data on the web, it’s necessary to consider both the fields you need, and also how those fields are presented. Sometimes that might be a list of predefined options, other times it will be free text. Once you’ve made that choice, you have to further decide whether options are a select box or a clickable element, and how many choices the user may make. For free text, you have to define ‘free’ with character limits and appropriate validation. Getting it right is sometimes trivial, and other times a complete bloody nightmare.
When collecting data about a person or user, one of the trickier decisions to make is how to collect whether a person is a Mr or a Mrs – their title. A common method is to present a short list (often just Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms) as a single-option select box. Some even go wild and include options such as Dr and even Rev.
The trouble with this approach is that people tend to be very particular about their titles – especially if their title is more unusual. Should you fail to include someone’s title in your list of options (and let’s face it, it’s going to be near impossible to get them all!), you risk causing offense. For this reason my favoured approach tends to be a free text field into which the user can type the title of their choice. After all, how much effort is it to type Mr or Mrs, and this of course caters for any unusual title the user may hold.
That said, when shopping online today at Boden I was surprised – no, delighted – to see the effort they’d gone to to provide a comprehensive list of options for their title select box. I’m not sure how many Squadron Leaders, Dukes, Marquesses, Viscounts and Earls they get buying from them online, but I’m sure their pleased to have the option when they do. See a screen shot of full list – impressive.
I stated that my favoured approach is to use a free text field, but that’s not quite true. Given the chance, I prefer to drop the title field entirely as very rarely is it of any use. Surely in this day and age, and particularly for a lot of the business conducted online, titles bear no importance.
Comments
I agree with you, title fields are pretty pointless. However, by not including one, you risk causing the same offence that you risk causing by have a select box with only a few options. There is always going to be that minority that do want to put their title down. I think the free text field is a good solution.
That said, including a list of weird titles, is probably just asking for people to enter in a strange title they don’t have and would never normally have thought of.
On an entirely different note, your sidebar is overflowing the boundaries of the content area, going right over the footerbar.
And yes, I know it overflows. I’ll fix it. Soon. You guys are like a stuck record ;)
That said, I’ve always secretly harboured a desire to drive a Morris Minor. Although any car that has ‘varnishing’ down in its list of maintenance tasks has to be reconsidered.
That could probably be done with some tricksy DHTML, although for most situations it wouldn’t really be worth it.
The receiving application should be written to parse the submitted name as required.
One of my pet web-annoyances are forms that limit the user with ill-conceived fields and unnecessary drop-downs. Classic faux-pas include:
* The aforementioned “title”;
* Required “Zip Code” (even for non-US visitors);
* Telephone number fields that test their input against US-format telephone numbers;
* Date-entry consisting entirely of drop-down-menus.
I could go on and I’m sure your readers could name many more.
I wish I woulda thought of this! Of course, my title selection would have to include “Master of the Known Universe”, “Supa-Phreak”, and “Pimp-daddy”...
Mr
Mrs
Ms
Miss
Air Commodore
Associate Professor
Admiral Sir
Brother
Bishop
Canon
Captain
Count
Commander
Dame
Dame Sister
Doctor
Doctor Dame
Doctorandus
Datuk
Emeritus Professor Dame
Emeritus Professor Sir
Emeritus Professor
Father
Father Reverend
Group Captain
Her Majesty
Honourable Mr Justice
The Honourable Judge
The Honourable Justice
The Honourable Sir
Honourable
Her Excellency
Her Worship
His Excellency
His Worship
Ir.
Judge
Justice
Lieutenant Commander
Lady
Lieutenant
Lieutenant Colonel
Mr Justice
Major
Miss
Mr
Mrs
Ms
Master
Padre
Professor Dame
Professor Doctor
Professor Sir
Prince
Professor
Pastor
Right Reverend Sir
Rabbi
Ratu
Reverend Dr Dame
Reverend Doctor
Reverend Miss
Reverend Professor
Reverend
The Right Honourable Dame
The Right Honourable Sir
The Right Honourable
The Right Reverend Dr
The Right Reverend
Squadron Leader
Shah
Sir
Sister
The Honourable Justice Sir
The Reverend Father
The Very Reverend
The Venerable
Not even broached is the topic of how the rest of the name should be displayed depending upon the title. To use ‘Revd. Mr. X’ or ‘Revd. Firstname X’ is correct but ‘Revd. X’ is not, while ‘Prof. X’ is perfectly acceptable.
Okay I might just have spent a little too long researching this. Thanks for some very cool lists of titles I can build into my (tiny) database app. On the wise advice of the other posters I will allow the users to use a title not in the list but we’ll leave ‘Alhaji’, ‘His Holiness’, ‘Pasha’ and the rest in as little easter eggs for the next admin… (‘Her Holiness’? Hmmm, might as well)
Joe
—‘It isn’t necessary to call me Father,’ the chaplain explained. ‘I’m an Anabaptist.’ [Catch-22, Joseph Heller]