Evolving a country selector over seven years.

Geography used to sit above everything.

Much of Brainnwave's intelligence platform was built around geospatial data, so choosing where you wanted to look was fundamental to almost everything else you did.

When I started working on the product, country and region selection lived in a sidebar. Choosing a region generated a long list of checkboxes, making something users did constantly increasingly cumbersome.

More importantly, the hierarchy felt wrong.

Your geographic selection affected everything in the platform, so I moved it above the main navigation. First choose where you're interested in, then choose what you want to explore there.

It worked - until the way people used the product changed.

The same problem kept changing.

As clients increasingly used the platform on laptops, vertical space became more important. The large header I'd designed suddenly wasn't such a great idea.

So I condensed it.

As the number of countries and regions grew, the selector itself became harder to navigate. We experimented with expandable multi-column layouts, added search, and - after a suggestion from one of our front-end developers - let users pin frequently used countries to the top.

Then a more fundamental change happened.

Different sections of the platform needed their own geographic selections. Someone could explore Oil & Gas data for one country, move into another section and work with a completely different part of the world.

Geography no longer sat above everything.

So the selector moved down into the filtering system for each section, and the rest of the interface evolved around the same approach.

Designing for the product you have now.

Over roughly seven years, the country selector moved, shrank, expanded, gained functionality and changed its position in the information architecture.

None of those iterations was the definitive answer.

They were responses to different products, technical capabilities, datasets, devices and ways of working.

That's probably what I like most about this example. Product design isn't always about finding one clever solution and defending it forever.

Sometimes the right decision is recognising that the thing you designed before isn't right anymore - because the problem has changed.