Agony of Choice? Webforms for Selecting Titles

Abstract

Eliciting information to formally address a user on a family-name basis is an aspect of user interface design that is inevitably connected to the issue of gender. In most cases an appropriate salutation includes information about the addressee's sex, i.e. it requires the designer to make decisions about how to present this information. Results from a survey of how webforms for selecting titles are designed are presented, showing a binary approach to gender, a tendency for the male title ("Herr") to be the given default, and offering several starting points for discussion on user experience of webforms, sex and gender.