You can tell if an ops person has any user experience saavy by the picklists on their forms. Consider the country select picklists on a “contact us” form. Most start like this:
- Afghanistan
- Akrotiri
- Albania
- Algeria
- American Samoa
- Andorra
- Angola
- Anguilla
- Antarctica
- Antigua and Barbuda
- Argentina
- Armenia
- Aruba
- Ashmore and Cartier Islands
- Australia
- Austria
- Azerbaijan
- ….
You gotta admire the thoroughness of most of us ops people. We’ve got to have every country on there, in alphabetical order. I wonder how many leads they get from Antarctica a month?
What’s thorough and logical from and ops perspective ends up being an annoyance for customers. They get to scroll through hundreds of irrelevant values. A clever marketer might put their biggest markets at the top of a picklist instead. An even smarter marketer might skip the field entirely and rely on inferred or enriched data instead.
You can see this same dynamic at play in products too. I was recently trying to book a flight through our travel agency. My home airport is SeaTac, and yet the app defaults me to the SPB airport code, which is a tiny seaplane terminal on Lake Union in Seattle. Wouldn’t it be nice if the app remembered my home location? Or the airport I typically fly from? Or better yet, if it put likely irrelevant locations near the bottom of the list?