 |
A project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it. By Mark Hurst. |
| About Mark Hurst | Mark's Gel Conference | New York Times Story on This Is Broken | Newsletter: Subscribe | RSS Feed |
Search this site:
Categories:
- Advertising
- Current Affairs
- Customer Service
- Fixed
- Food and Drink
- Just for Fun
- Misc
- Not broken
- Place
- Product Design
- Signs
- Travel
- Web/Tech
Previous: Budget rent-a-car phone | Main | Next: Billboard wording (funny)
December 8, 2003 03:28 AM
Broken: Reset button on any lengthy form
Dan Cummins writes:
After filling out a lengthy online form [like the one shown here], almost everyone will want to click the Go button to submit the form.But why is the Reset button placed so close to the Go button? Who would intentionally click the Reset button after filling out a lengthy online form? Plus, many will accidentally click the Reset button, leading to some frustrated visitors!
The message is clear - move or remove the unnecessary Reset buttons.
(I found this on www.homeplans.com, in Advanced Search.)
As a developer of this kind of stuff, I understand the need to have the feature. I agree not to put it there, but where shall I put it? At the top of the form, it will be missed completely. Removing it, and allowing someone to refresh or use the back button instead can be problematic for some web apps. I usually make the button say something like "Start Over", and then provide a dialog box that warns someone I'm going to erase everything. No one reads those, though do they? Any opinion would be appreciated.
Scott: One trick is to use the Content-Expires HTTP header to control the freshness of form content. We've all had the experience of hitting the Back button to return to a previous page only to find out it's "Expired" and the browser refuses to display any content.
Secondly, if you need to create a stateful chain of pages (like a multi-page, user-data-driven form), create your OWN forward and back buttons on the page and place them adjacent. Both buttons save the status of the current form, but allow you to navigate in either direction. That way, if you go the wrong way, nothing is lost.
Finally, I disagree with the need for the "Start Over" button. Users seem to understand that if they abandon a form the data goes away (i.e., closing the browser window or typing a new URL into the address bar). I have never seen a need for the Reset Form button.
I am a web developer and I agree with Robby, I think generally reset buttons are not necessary. That is all, thank you. :-)
As a developer, I say, yeah, reset buttons are hardly ever needed.
This is slightly better than having two buttons, one reset, one submit, about the same size and shape right next to each other.
In general, less than clever developers include the button because it's very easy to do with a basic form. But it should only be used in situations where you can edit existing data that's just been loaded from like a database, not when you're entering data from scratch.
The "GO" and "Reset Form" are two separate links, moron. Hitting "GO" will perform your search, hitting "Reset Form" will reset the form.
I use this user style sheet rule to hide reset buttons:
input[type="reset"], button[type="reset"] { display:none }
(See http://www.squarefree.com/userstyles/ for more rules and how to create a user style sheet.)
Comments on this entry are closed
Previous: Budget rent-a-car phone | Main | Next: Billboard wording (funny)
This looks like it's got another feature(?) that I gripe about. Type size that can't be enlarged. My over-40 eyes just can't focus like they used to!
Posted by: Rick at December 8, 2003 01:08 PM