It Was The Best Of Forms, It Was The Worst Of Forms

Years ago, I remember an article on computer usability. They had an example of an online form where you had to choose the city you were from. This form was used by people from all over the US, so when you type in the city name, if there was more than one city by that name in the country, it would have to ask which state before proceeding. The usability experts suggested that this was poor design, since the vast majority of people who type, "Boston" will be from the famous Boston in Massachusetts, but they will have to select it from a list of all the pokey little Bostons around the US.

This article suggested that web site should just send you to the page for Boston, Massachusetts, and make the citizens of other Bostons have to click a link to go to another Boston. (That's sort of how Wikipedia works: If you search for Boston, it sends you to the Boston MA page, and forces you to choose the "Disambiguation Page" to choose a different Boston.) At the time, I - being from a small town - thought that was an unfair approach. Yes, I know, I'm forcing the 4.6 million people in the greater Boston area to pick their city our of a list, just for the sake of a few hundred people from other Bostons. But hey, equality and all that. If Vermont gets as many senators as California, then Bostonians can make an extra click.

Well, after another decade or so of filling in forms online, I take that back. Kitchener, British Columbia, I hate you. You may only be a few streets in the Kootenays, but some people seem to think you deserve to be listed in online forms, instead of rolling you in with Cranbrook. If it was, say, Kitchener, Saskatchewan, then we'd at least be at the top of the list by alphabetical order and we wouldn't have to scroll down. But no, we have to key down to miss the few hundred of you or whatever; I don't even know the population, because you don't even get your own Wikipedia page.

Look, "Kitchener" isn't a great name. It sounds weird, and it honours a really despicable man. So you'd think we could at least have it to ourselves. And unlike Ontarians, British Columbians are great at naming things. I mean, Kamloops, Nanaimo, Chilliwack, Kelowna. So please, leave us to our strange name.