Following one of our geekier team debates, I recently did a deep-dive into the most usable UX and UI design pattern for a date-of-birth form field and was really surprised to find that existing research and best practice is not, apparently, reflected in the UI toolkits put forward by Material Design or iOS 14.
What is the problem we’re trying to solve?
Date of birth. We only really want to capture three pieces of data; day, month, year — what can the problem be?
Simples. There are too many different form field and data capture options available to designers, not to mention those designers or devs who are not into following accepted design patterns and prefer to make up new and exciting things out of thin air. As a result, one can easily encounter products that have entirely new Frankenstein UI or interaction formats, for seemingly non evidence-based Reasons.
This is unfortunate when we know that following patterns creates a sense of familiarity for users, which improves usability and decreases user error, stress and inaccurate data capture.
