How to Simplify 5 Dropdown Menus into 1 Compound Picker

One context, one field, one interaction

Imagine you’re booking a hotel room and you have to interact with five dropdown menus. The amount of cognitive effort required would make you think twice about booking.

You might abandon the task and choose to book elsewhere. You might struggle through the task with frustration. Whatever the case, you’re not going to have a pleasant user experience.

Multiple dropdown menus are not the way to get form input from users. They’re difficult for those with limited manual dexterity to use since they require fine motor control to scroll the option list.

In addition, they add a heavy load on working memory because each menu is an isolated interaction and context switch when it closes. As a result, users have to recall what they previously selected while they process the next selection and so forth.