forms - Date of birth input... best approach?

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Most User-Friendly Form Fields for Entering Date/Time?
Whats the best way to display DOB form fields?

Entering your date of birth into a form should be straight forward, but I've seen a few different approaches to handling this.

The most popular choices seem to be

• Freeform (perhaps with an input hint to imply how it should be filled in)


• Datepicker (uses selects from a calender popup)


• 3 select boxes (makes sure data is valid, but for a large year range might not be easy to fill in)

What is the best approach to entering your date of brith you have seen? how would you handle this? Does anyone have any studies of usability tests for this?

Answer

Freeform with an input hint is probably the quickest and simplest. People tend to be very good at typing their birthdate (I guess I've typed mine hundreds of times).

For general date input, the other solutions might be good, but simple text input works well for birthdates. (The hint is necessary to remove ambiguity between d/m/yyyy and m/d/yyyy.)