codeforboston
Should Household members upon creation be given a default age or a blank age?
On the Household tab, when you have the Head of Household or you add a Spouse or Child, the family member is added with a default age (30 for Head of Household/Spouse, and 12 for Child). Should an age be automatically added in?
If the age is auto-filled, it may signal to the user that the field is already filled out, so the user does not need to fill out the form. As a result, it may cause the user to not modify the ages to the correct values -- would that cause issues for the benefits analysis?
Others are free to chime in. For my part, this sounds like a good question, but like something we'd want to look at through user testing before changing what we're doing. An empty field would mean possibly significantly more complexity in our code, so it'd be worth knowing if it's a problem users will actually have.
Looks like there hasn't been any discussion on this in a while. I don't think default age is a good way to go here. Operator error could really throw off results with a feature like this.
@dylanesque: Ok, good input. It would take some discussion, though, as that change would need a pretty big system overhaul. Could you add it as an item the next time the alert system pipes up?
This is part of a bigger discussion about handling default values and our data structures.