Users Confuse “Country” dropdown for “State”

Yeah, I just did that myself today. Definitely confusing for folks in the US.

I've heard the idea to move the country select to the top of the list in the past. How does that strike you, drewish? I don't know what sites to go to for comparison... has anyone shopped international on Amazon.com?

the top doesn't seem too bad to me. you start a form like this and there's such a patter than you read the first few and then zone out. seems like up top you'd still be focusing.

To have a natural "zoom out" I suggest we just swap "State/Province" and "Country". So users come across "State/Province" first and will find Colorado... This is also the common experience/interface I know from online shops and websites in Europe (including Amazon, I just checked now).

Obviously this works even better when the IP is used in pre-populating the country because of the state dependency.

@xibun - the problem with moving country last is that state/province depends on the country. Let's say a site has US and Canada enabled. US is default. They go to select Manitoba but don't see it in the dropdown. They get angry. They may abandon their cart. Some Canadians would realize "Oh, select country and then the provinces will update."

I think we really need to keep the Country before the province.

in quick testing, the patch from #4 above -- moving the country dropdown to the top of the fieldset -- seems like a good solution to me. thanks, ezra-g.

To answer Ryan's question in #2 - Amazon does geo-ip targetting and forces you to use the store for the country where you are (i.e. from the UK you cannot go to amazon.com but must go to amazon.co.uk). So, they solve this way earlier in the flow.

The Ubuntu shop (I recently walked through the process and knew they let you choose a country) makes you register/login before purchasing and makes you create an address as part of signup. Here's a screen capture: http://skitch.com/greggles/b9hwc/canonical-store They just make you state your province and then have a dropdown for country. IMO, that's a pretty horrible workflow that is likely to lead to lots of abandoned shopping carts.

So, it seems that moving the country earlier in the process is a pretty common solution to this.

Awesome info, Greg. Thanks for the bit o' research. I should've remembered that about Amazon.com. : P

I have had issues with this in the past, and I would like to see it fixed, but I'm not sure displaying the country above the persons name fields is logical. That being said, I don't have a better suggestion, because normally you enter name->address->city->state->zip. Country is required before state, but as you noted, that disrupts the clients expected workflow.

Ezra, have you had a chance to do any usability testing with your patch to measure customer response?

We know what we have in UC right now is bad.

The patch might be better. Let's get some real-world testing by committing it and seeing what the feedback will be.

Given that 6.x-2.0 is around the corner, I'm not sure if it's better to commit this now so it will be consistent across all the 2.x releases or if we should wait for just after 6.x-2.0 so that only people on dev will get the new version.

For my part, I'm definitely not opposed to introducing tweaks like this in planned minor releases. I'm just kind of worried that switching the standard at this point would catch everyone by surprise and we'd have to deal w/ that in support. If there were some way for addresses to be more configurable for multinational stores and we could make this the default order from them on I'd be all for it.

I think that this did not make it in 2.0... 8-)

I just checked and changing the Country to Canada indeed makes the state drop down change, but not instantaneously.

So... my point of view would be that an auto-complete would be best. That way we could support any state or region from anywhere and the country still as a dropdown. This is somewhat annoying because you need to validate the state on submit (we should validate anyway, to avoid false positive!)

Thank you.
Alexis Wilke

Surely the best solution would be to make State/Province a textfield and simply move it above country and below city. While the select state/province is a neat feature its not always workable for certain countries. Here in the UK the Post Office discourages the implementation of it since if you live in a large city you don't have a state/province. Also many of the contributed .cif files contain country names in English and states in their native language, so China is "China" and the states are chinese characters, isn't this bad design? And how are we to know that the states are correct? Worldwide, states and provinces can change far more frequently than countries themselves. How are we to keep up until a potential buyer has to inform us of the country states in question?

Saying all that I'm yet to figure out how to convert it to a text field myself!

It's over two years since this was opened and it hasn't seen a review from someone who commits to ubercart since September of 2009.

It's already fixed in Commerce.

Let's just call it won't fix.

If we're going to do this it needs to be configurable, we can't just switch this out on people in the middle of a release cycle.

Seeing no one will fix it.. I just did a work around for this in CSS. its better than having it confuse people on the bottom. I moved it to the top of First Name, so people will start out putting in their country first which would populate the other fields below. This is much better UI improvement than nothing.

screen shot: http://prntscr.com/28ygm

/* CheckOut Page - moves the country field above first name - UI improvement*/
#delivery-address-pane { position:relative; width: 600px;}
#billing-address-pane { position:relative; width: 600px;}
.form-item-panes-billing-billing-first-name { padding: 34px 0 0 !important }
.form-item-panes-billing-billing-country { position: absolute; top: 5px; width: 98%; height: 24px; }
.form-item-panes-delivery-delivery-first-name { padding: 34px 0 0 !important}
.form-item-panes-delivery-delivery-country { position: absolute; top:5px; width: 98%; height: 24px; }

Tell me if it works or not for you guys.

With Extra Fields Pane 6.x-2.x users are able to change the order of address fields (works with Ubercart 6.x-2.3 or later).

This is basically a duplicate of #344706: Change the order of address fields and is already fixable in 6.x using the contrib noted above.