I have a page with a fairly long booking form. One of the tasks on that form is to select a charity from a list of about 200 charities. If the desired charity is not present, the user can enter a new one.
I'm considering changing this to a text input field with auto-complete. So the user starts typing the name of a charity and gets a dynamically changing list of possible matches to select from. Sounds good, right?
But I'm concerned that things might go wrong for some users. Perhaps a user starts typing and makes a spelling mistake before they realise or before they look again at the screen. They enter a variant name of a charity that already exists on the system, but they are unaware of this. So they could end up entering it as a new charity, and we have duplicate entries introduced into the data.
Perhaps I should add a search button, so they input the name of the charity, click search and get a list of possible matches, before selecting one of those, or confirming that they want to create a new charity. This seems more secure, but adds another step of interaction and makes the form more complex.
In a way, it is very tempting to retain the good-old select box with it's long list of entries. It is simpler, more robust, and easier to implement. But somewhat inconvenient for users.
Anyone else had a similar problem?
You need to be a member of Bristol Usability Group to add comments!
Join Bristol Usability Group