So it’s monday morning, feeling a little uptight about sitting in the office after a great hike in mpumalanga. i feel like picking on someone.

Got an email from Samsung inviting me to enter a competition - click through, everything works fine until my birth date needs to be entered.

Now there’s plenty of easy-to-use drop down form options that could be used for me to complete the date of birth, but in the end, the developers have decided to use some kind of javascript looking tool that “makes it easier” to select the date.

I have two issues with the implementation of this:
1. It doesn’t work in Firefox. I’m filling out the form and get to “Date of Birth” and nothing happens. Switch over to IE (using IE Tab), and the world’s ugliest date chooser displays:

2. Technical complexities aside, I feel that Samsung has failed to optimised its “Competition entry funnel” (I just made that up) in other words, they’re not maximising the conversions on traffic coming through. It’s a well known fact that conversion rate drop-offs do occur on every page that a form filler has to complete. The inclusion of a birth date date selector that starts in 2006, initially shows 2003 to 2009 (i think it should start somewhere in the middle of their target market), and the black on blue scheme just pushes it over the edge (for me at least).

I do feel like i might be making something out of nothing here, but on the other hand (Darren), how difficult is it for designers and developers to do a quick test in Firefox? No Firefox support makes me sad. Does the entry form REALLY need such an over engineered date chooser?

Can’t we all just settle the debate on function over form once and for all?

In the case of Samsung Colours, I think function just scored an own goal against form in this ongoing clash of the heavyweights.

end./