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Serious question, I picked a dropdown over radio buttons on a signup form and watched 200 people skip a required field
Last year I built a signup page for a small gym here in Tampa and I had to choose between a dropdown menu or radio buttons for the "how did you hear about us" question. I went with the dropdown because it looked cleaner and saved vertical space on mobile, plus I figured everyone knows how those work by now. Shipped it on a Tuesday, and by Friday the front desk lady pulled me aside and showed me 200 signups where people just left that field blank even though it was required. Turns out half the older members didn't even notice the little arrow on the right side, they thought it was just a label, not a clickable box. I switched it to radio buttons with big fat labels the next week and the skip rate dropped to almost nothing. The part that stings is I had a gut feeling during the build and ignored it because I liked how tidy the dropdown looked. So my hack now is this: if a field has fewer than 5 choices, never bury them behind a click, just show them all. Has anyone here had a dropdown blow up on them like that, or is it just me?
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robinmason3d ago
Been there. Anything under like 6 options should just be visible, dropdowns hide stuff and people scroll right past them without noticing.
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