I’m trying to come up with a nicer way to gather a length input (for example 5’9"). Googling is proving frustrating because “length” and “height” all give me results about character limits and CSS of field heights, etc.
Currently I’m using 2 number boxes smashed together and the user has to type in a 5 and then move to the next box and type in a 9.
Making it a text field proved to be a poor choice since we got all sorts of varying formats that we had to manually clean up.
This is actually more a UX type question so I did a bit of research for you. There’s a great discussion on this post regarding what’s the best way to collect Height:
TLDR: Usually it depends on if your users are going to be entering feet and inches or if they’re european and will be entering in metric. Metric will do centimeters so one numeric field is fine. American’s/imperial are weird and we always have the two inputs. You might be better off having two fields side by side one for feet and one for inches as text inputs or you could use a Drop-down select that shows as a label the choices through a range and the value is actually in inches so it’s easier to calculate against. Drop-downs are fairly easy to use especially since on a phone you can just scroll down until you get the matching height spread.
I would probably do that myself, but the slider option showed in that article also made sense, but the two fields side by size that limited the ‘inches’ to be between 1 and 11 would also work.
