Help with County search option

clusk007

Hi guys,

In the process of designing a website to help people search a certain area for a wheelchair accessible taxi. I'm working with a website designer and we've hit a small stumbling block which I'm hoping someone here maybe able to help us with.

It's in regards to driver registration form. At the registration form the driver will input regular details (e-mail, phone number etc). We then need the driver to select the areas they cover done by firstly County, region (North County Dublin, South County Dublin etc) and then in for example North County Dublin there may be 20 different towns to select. this process needs to be as simple as possible for the drivers so don't want to have to use the ctrl button to select multiple options. Anyone have any suggestions of the best way to do this? I've been using this website as a guide for the towns (below the map) http://www.goireland.com/dublin/dublin-city-centre.htm
when a user then searches the website they will either be able to select the region or the town.

Stephen

mari2222

could they click on a map?

amen

Why not just have section called Locations I serve?
They add a town/area.
When finished they can add another and you can just display all of them below the add section.

Beside each location you can add a remove button so they can remove the location if they are no longer serving it.

clusk007

the problem with that is there may be up to 50 areas they serve and it's not practical to have them fill out all that information without putting them off. As for the map option, I don't know how practical it would be but it's something I can suggest to the designer. Thanks for that.

clusk007

any other suggestions?

COYW

I have done something along these lines before but you have an extra level of detail in the towns. We had a map of Ireland and you clicked on the county/counties to determine your search region.

The towns make it messy, to be honest. Have you thought about doing a county selection and then presenting a filterable list of towns, within the areas selected, on a new page with a submit button?

Procasinator

Sounds like a typical tree interface. County -> Area -> Towns. You can often expand/collapse each node.

Think of when you are installing a program with multiple option components. Each parent would have a checkbox like item, but with 3 states: select none, some some, select all. In Windows installers, this is usually symbolised with a blank box, a box filled with a solid box and a standard tick checkbox.

So if someone server the whole North County Dublin but none of South, the Dublin County would have a box fill, North County Dublin would have a tick (cause all towns are covered) and South County Dublin would have empty.

You could then also offer text filtering/search, so if a person only covered a few towns they could begin typing the town name and be presented the towns that match on there own to tick.

Of course, depending on how much data you are showing, it might make sense not to display that way but rather just use a heading system similar to the page you linked to, allowing checkbox by each item. You could make it so only the county selected is present at each time, if you'd like. This might be more appropriate as more than likely a lot of drivers will only be serving a couple of counties.

I think if you keep a separate list visible of what the user has currently selected the usability will be improved, as they won't need to go through the filters to check and manually scan through.