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I live in… the Bouvet Islands
By admin | August 5, 2008
For a number of years now I’ve enjoyed find the Bouvet Islands in the drop down country list of e-commerce sites and registration forms etc. According to wikipedia:
Bouvet Island (Norwegian: Bouvetøya, also historically known as Liverpool Island or Lindsay Island) is an uninhabited sub-antartic island in the South Atlantic Ocean, south-southwest of the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa). It is a dependent area of Norway and is not subject to the Antarctic Treaty.
What the hell is it doing in a drop down list of where people live? Ahhhh, the sheer pleasure of a comprehensive country list that no one thinks to sift for countries where people can’t actually live. I chanced upon as the name intrigued me when I was scanning the list for Britain, England, UK, United Kindom, Great Britain or whatever they’d decided to use.
It’s got the status of being the most remote island in the world. Get that. I’d like to get a Bouvet Island domain. Or how about a holiday visit just to see what happens when I try to get stuff sent and billed there… Check out the picture. If I didn’t get sea sick I’d be setting up the expedition right now.
There is an unmanned weather station there, perhaps I can get some rack space there? Seriously, the word inhospitable isn’t strong enough for this place. It’s neighbouring island is no longer there!
The moral of the story is, the devil’s in the details, check those facts, don’t trust someone else to have got it right. I’m off to set up the Web developer’s quick reference e-commerce Country look up table that doesn’t include the uninhabitable places of the world to try to right this catastrophic wrong.
Topics: IA/Usability/User Experience |
August 5th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Inhospitable. And not to mention the fact that it is probably shrinking as I write…