Get rid of the automatic dropdown that appears when a suggestion text field has a wrong input

Question

Hi there,
This question is related to this one, although is not exactly the same:
https://support.soscisurvey.de/?qa=51841/participants-limited-options-mistyped-deleted-wrong-letters

I have the same type of question with a list of countries. My problem is when you input a not valid country (e.g., Wales instead of United Kingdom) a dropdown appears to select one of the partial matches and also the open-end field is still visible to amend the input.

All this is fine on desktop, but on mobile, the screen is not wide enough to display all the elements, and the question becomes messy.

Is there a way I can delete that dropdown and leave the question as clean as possible?

Thanks!

Comments

What about a small button on the upper right of the dropdown for the respondents to close the list, if it's not helpful? Or would a different format on mobile devices be a better solution? Just removing the selection seems not a good idea to me, as you'll get a lot of "other" responses in your dataset.

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My first thought was to remove the selection dropdown, but it's true that it could be a good idea to keep it.
The problem I found was not how to use the dropdown but how to identify what is what when you have four elements side by side in an smartphone screen. That's why I believe that a small button wouldn't be useful, because even opening the dropdown itself is not easy at all. See an screenshot here: https://imgur.com/a/npX4ewS
Instead, to use the space better, I would say that 'transforming' the open-end field into the dropdown rather than keeping both visible would be a solution. If the respondent select 'Other', the field allows them to enter a new response as it does now.
I would like to make it clear that the current behaviour is more than satisfactory, it's only the use of space on mobile *when a wrong answer is trying to be submitted* which is not optimous, I would say.
For now, I found a solution giving as less space as possible to the 'Country:' label on the left as well as the residual option 'No answer' on the right and keep the central column as dynamic. This way, the question displays better and it is usable.

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Thank you fort posting the screenshot. That's indeed no good solution. The DK option must move below the input on such a small screen. We will take a look why it's not working properly. We shall find a solution within a few days.

> 'transforming' the open-end field into the dropdown rather than keeping both visible would be a solution.

That is not actually an option. Imagine, you use that question to allow for a selection on 10.000 options (this is why we originally created the question type), you would scroll to death.

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Thanks for looking into it!

Indeed, moving it below the input field would be an ideal solution. It seems pretty obvious now but I didn't think about it before. Sounds good that could be solved, we will be keeping an eye on this topic.

And yes, I agree, the proposed solution wouldn't be an viable option.

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

Thanks, again, for pointing out that display issue. We have just installed an update that allows the label, the input, and (if broad enough) the DK option to warp into multiple lines.

Please give it a try, if the result looks better, now. If not, feel free to create and post a pretest URL that directs to the respective page in the questionnaire.

Comments

So quick! I didn't expect a solution for this until next week at least.

Unfortunately, it didn't work for us (tested in two different devices, both Android and iOS) and the input field is still side by side with the dropdown. It looks better now since we rearranged the columns width, giving as much space as possible to this two fields.

Please, follow this link to see the question:
https://s2survey.net/lib243/?act=wyGggTjfZ30Aou40qrxE6egC

Thanks again, we really appreciate so much kind and quick help.

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Well, I did not expect to find time for that today, as well ;)

The update is installed on www.soscisurvey.de, but not on s2survey.net, yet. We usually wait for feedback from the default server for a few days, before applying an update to the pro-server. That allows for a bit of additional reliability for our paying customers.

If you're in a hurry, let me know. Otherwise, I will update the pro-server on Monday.

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Das Update 3.6.04 wurde nun auch auf dem Pro-Server s2survey.net installiert.