The select element, a tale from my past

Gary wrote a post entitled For­get Select — it is Browse, Browse, Browse in which he was sur­prised by the res­ults of a usab­il­ity test involving a select list, or more spe­cific­ally users ignor­ing the select.

I was not sur­prised by the res­ults of Gary’s test, and for a long time have only used select ele­ment with extreme cau­tion. Because the first site I ever worked on some 11 years ago, the designer decided to use as much space as pos­sible for two lead pro­mo­tional pieces on the home page and placed the nav­ig­a­tion in a select ele­ment, with some expli­cit instruc­tions on how to use it.

Unfor­tu­nately, vis­it­ors did not use it. The fig­ures where pretty scary, of those who star­ted on the home page and vis­ited another page. Roughly 30% used the select list to nav­ig­ate away from the home page to con­tent. Less than 20% went to a lead art­icle and over 50% went straight from the home to the search page (which was a sep­ar­ate link from the nav­ig­a­tion). Where the major­ity after three searches left the site.

Armed with these stat­ist­ics, the home page was redesigned, the select was replaced with a vis­ible con­tent list, the num­ber of pro­mo­tional pieces dropped to one. The res­ults were dra­matic, the num­ber of people who vis­ited more than one page increased by more than 10%. The num­ber of vis­it­ors who went straight from the home page to search page went from over 50% to less than 20%. In other words, the num­ber of people using the nav­ig­a­tion more than doubled, going from 30% to well over 60%.

Another inter­est­ing fact was the aver­age num­ber of searches per vis­itor to the search page went down from 3 to a little over 1. Which indic­ated search ori­ent­ated people, went straight to the search page, know­ing what terms to search for. Instead of frus­trated vis­it­ors not know­ing where to find the con­tent and unsure of the ter­min­o­logy used.

This exper­i­ence, which showed that over 50% of all vis­it­ors did not use a select ele­ment. Has made me very cau­tious about using select ele­ments. Sure it was 11 years ago, but I do believe that user beha­viour has changed that much since then.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 5:17 pm and is filed under css and html, usability . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.