Real talk: Innovating the dropdown

2 minutes read

Dropdowns used to be simple.

You pick an option and you move on with your day. But now? Every dropdown needs to be the Swiss Army knife of form controls.

We've got autocomplete typeaheads mashed together with multi-select. Checkboxes are now living inside dropdowns. Right next to search bars inside the same dropdown. Select all buttons sit neatly next to deselect all buttons. They're actual buttons if you're lucky, by the way. We must group with collapsible sections, because why not. And yeah, those stupid tags that appear when you select things. Each comes with their own little X button to remove them.

We saw a basic select element and thought, "How can we make this monumentally more complex?"

And herein lies the problem.

Every little thing we bolt onto a dropdown is another thing that needs to work with keyboards. Another focus state to manage. Another interaction screen readers need to announce properly. And guess what we forget? Yup, all of it.

So we end up with these Frankenstein widgets that look impressive in demos, but are completely unusable for anyone who doesn't use a mouse.

Why not just use a normal dropdown? Because it needs to do 20 things at once. If it needs 20 features, maybe it shouldn't be a dropdown at all.

Anyway, why am I ranting about this?

Because that's what I'm working on now.

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