Usability in practice: “Enter the date”

Hello everyone again.
Today I will talk about my beloved - about usability.

In Russian, there is this fashionable word replacement - Convenience. But when it comes to the convenience of human-computer interaction, we immediately say usability.

This article will consider only the date entry form, which we so often meet when registering on any site. Most often asked to enter your date of birth. Why should all administrators in the world know the day of my birth is unknown, but we will assume that for statistics.
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First, let's delve into history.

All the very first sites and programs offered the user the following field:



Naturally, problems immediately arose. People filled this field as best they could and got used to:

July 12, 1980
12-07-1980
07/12/80

and so on…

Therefore, the following was invented:



But some were on the drum for it, others simply did not read what was written in brackets.
Then the programmers came up with the idea of ​​dividing the field into three:



It seems to be a sigh of relief. But users are stupid people and they wanted to spit on these fields. For these reasons, a month was driven into the field on the day and vice versa. Who entered the month with a number, and some with a word.

The developers became thoughtful and realized that the best way to avoid errors from stupid users is to prevent them from allowing them. And they invented this:


As such, this form is found on most sites to this day. And everything seems to be fine, but there are many BUT.

First, it does not exclude everyone there on February 31.
secondly, it’s easy to choose the month itself, but here’s the day, and especially the year, to choose a very difficult task. Judge for yourself:


It takes a long time to scroll to get to the desired year. And we, in fact, strive for ideality and must adapt the interface, both for old people and for babies. In this regard, on many current sites we see the following:

mail.ru


Yandex

Any forums


ebay
 

Unfortunately, all these forms are not foolproof and do not exclude the entry of, say, such a date: November 31, 3450.

What can we do? And you can do a lot. We can take into account the characteristics of each month, as well as a leap year or not.

- Yes, you ahrenel! - programmers will say.

But I will say that this module will have to be done once and then in the future without any problems to fasten it to any of your products.

But in connection with this, the order of filling will have to be changed: first, we will enter the year and month, and then, on the basis of the data obtained, put the necessary number of days in the Day list. Moreover, the Day list will not be available to the user until he selects the Year and Month.




Well, it seems there shouldn't be any problems, as is customary, it moves from left to right.

But there are still problems. Year and Day lists are still not usable.
What can we do?

I came up with this:



In my opinion, in such a list it will be easier to find the required year - the eye easily clings to dozens, and, well, it is also not difficult to hold down several lines. No tedious scrolling.

List Month, it seems, does not require any modifications.

But the Day can be represented in the classic calendar block



Naturally, the days should be displayed on the basis of the first two fields.

In my opinion, such a form for entering the date of birth will avoid knowingly incorrect dates and give the user a convenient input.

I would welcome any comments.