Wednesday, 10 June 2009

Odd Webform dropdown: gender






To keep picking on the funny webform that thinks Uttar Pradesh could be in the UK (or the US, or Japan...), here's another weird dropdown from the same form, this time for "Gender":

Uh, "Unknown"?

Even transexual / transgender people identify with (or in the case of a hermaphrodite usually have no choice but to identify with) a particular gender.

If that's a trying-to-be-politically-correct attempt to cater for those who consider themselves to be of a third gender, at least use "Other" or "Neither" - much more PC than "Unknown", which just insults people's ability to know their own sexual identity.

And it's not exactly usable Web design is it? I dread to see what they've done with the rest of that form...

(For more Web form annoyances see funny/weird use of radio buttons; and dealing with multicultural names on web forms).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

'Undisclosed' would be better - and an appropriate default much of the time. We are asked for gender disclosure so often when it simply should not be relevant.

Improbulus said...

Excellent point. As you say, most of the time why should it matter? Too often though the field is compulsory.

They just want it for their marketing profiling I suspect...

Anonymous said...

It's 'Unknown' to the database/website/other viewers of the site. Kind of like how I'm not really "Anonymous" ('having no known name or identity') from my own point of view.