The UK Government Digital Service design team shares research and patterns behind GOV.UK forms, components, and services.
Commenters cite its research that three text boxes work best for dates of birth, and hold GOV.UK up as best practice in design and accessibility.
> These [unintended consequences] include: decreasing overall inclusivity; dehumanizing; including people who should be excluded; being imprecise, inaccurate or misleading; and disembodying and undermining breastfeeding.
Describing the wrong groups, and being misleading, are exactly what I am not advocating for. I have, sadly, seen people advocate find-and-replacing in a document to make it “more inclusive”, and that never ends well. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem) The majority of phrases criticised by that article are… awful. (Seriously, “gestational carrier”? “Pregnant” is already a noun.)
> “8 in 10 people” will get pregnant after having unprotected sex
Obviously you don't use clunky language constructions, and you certainly don't do that. (If you are, I dare say that's not the only problem with your writing.) But one doesn't stop being a woman at menopause: this ambiguity might cause clear communication for some, but it comes at the expense of unclear communication for others.
For accessibility, you can't have a one-size-fits-all text.[0] There's a reason we have separate easy-read versions.[1] Provide an imprecise, oversimplified summary if it improves outcomes, but don't make that the only version.
> They may not know, for example, that “a person with a cervix” is a woman and refers to them
If people don't know what the cervix is, explain what the cervix is, probably in parentheses. Rather than constructing an artificial example, I'll…
I don't know if this is laziness and ineptitude on the govt's part or not. You see the design team for UK gov websites have been getting a lot of attention and praise for their efforts, the most recent being here just ten days ago on the subject of check boxes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29238968 .
Now anyone with a rudimentary handle of the English language would probably have noticed the misspelling of carcasses on the blogpost https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2021/11/15/letting-users-tick-a-none-checkbox/ and Yorwba highlighted this on 17 November 2021 as seen in the comments. The team duly acknowledge this as seen with the updated image here https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/53/2021/11/Design-System-filter-question-with-titles-620x414.jpg and the original misspelling can still be seen here https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/53/2021/11/Filter-question-and-question-gov-uk-design-system-example.jpg
Anyway, it would seem their commenting system will not allow links to be posted to them or they choose to ignore links or didn't understand the comment posted when comments like "https://www.bing.com/search?q=plural+of+carcass" come through to them which is metadata for the type of filtering being employed on their comments section.
I think its worth looking at their design principles which can be seen here https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles "#1 Start with user needs Service design starts with…
The HTML form <input> element has a lot of interactive controls already e.g. colour picker, a date control for entering dates, file picker, number entry with spinner controls and more:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/input
The problem is that some HTML form controls cannot be styled with CSS to render consistently across browsers. So, many sites fall back on JavaScript to render the control. Here is an example from 2016 on styling HTML checkboxes and radio buttons to make them larger (which, as far I can tell, is still a problem): https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2016/11/30/weve-updated-the-radios-and-checkboxes-on-gov-uk/
Hi,
GDS in the UK has done a lot of work around use of language and design to simplify services like this, it's worth having a look at some of their blog.
In particular, there was a big change from thing-gov-cares about to verbs, so instead of just "fill in a XYZ" you get "I want to do X".
I understand here, you need to think about the particular gov forms, but it's also good to surface some things that are user centric, to funnel them to the right place.
https://gds.blog.gov.uk/
https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2015/06/22/good-services-are-verbs-2/
https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2017/03/27/naming-your-service-a-new-approach-to-patterns/
Funny you mention that, because out of curiosity I clicked "Categories" -> "Communities" to see what else they have on their blog, and the first thing it showed was a post from June stating that they were hiring:
https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2021/06/24/were-hiring-interaction-and-service-designers/
I'm sure the positions are filled now, but it also goes into what they are looking for in interaction and service designers.
Not the parent but the answer is don't use the date picker at all for date of birth. The gov.uk site, which is generally held up as an example of best practice design and accessibility because they do over the shoulder testing on real devices with real users from different backgrounds advises to just use three text field with the number property.
https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2013/12/05/asking-for-a-date-of-birth/