Instead of asking “why?” consider asking “why not?”
You’re right, that is an easier question to answer!
Everyone is saying this was impossible to solve without fixing the underlying tool, but just writing a prefixes from 01 to 12 would have been my solution.
Now you don’t even need to remember the months to select the correct one.
Speaking as a UX designer, probably because some “product manager” decided it was too expensive to override the auto- sort that was applied before the designer was brought in to “pretty things up.”
There is no tone of bitterness in my comment, honestly there isn’t.
Yeah, I was going to say they just left a default alphabetical sort to their global droplist component and called it a day. Probably works fine in most contexts, but this one - not so much.
I once got a user requirement that specifically say all drop down lists must be sorted alphabetically
eight, five, four, nine, one, seven, six, ten, three, two … ew
8, 5, 4, 9, 1, 7, 6, 10, 3, 2
They are probably reusing a component that happen to sort its entries alphabetically, since that is most commonly the expected behaviour. If the form is configured in a CMS, whoever built it might not even know it’s happening and has entered the data properly, but it gets resorted in the presentation layer. It’s also not impossible that the behaviour of the component has changed at some point and this particular case didn’t have test coverage or wasn’t actually part of the specification.
For organization?
Why even make a dropdown? It would be quicker just to type a number