Web forms design guidelines: an eyetracking study

Re:Web forms design guidelines: an eyetracking study by ams6110 on Sunday December 06, 2009 @12:10AM (#979196)

It's my gut feeling that asterisks are so commonly used to indicate required fields that most users have come to understand their meaning. Nevertheless I also like the "optional indicator in the field" idea, and I also agree with the advice in the article to only ask for required fields. In other words, if a field is optional, give strong consideration to omitting it from the form entirely.

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Re:Web forms design guidelines: an eyetracking study by NathanKP on Sunday December 06, 2009 @12:13AM (#979203)

If a field is optional, give strong consideration to omitting it from the form entirely.

I totally agree. In that case less is more. You want users to go through a sign up form quickly and be able to get started. You can always provide a settings panel on the other side for adding extra, optional information.

By keeping those fields off the signup form you make things easy and fast for new users.

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Re:Web forms design guidelines: an eyetracking study by araneae on Sunday December 06, 2009 @12:25AM (#979213)

I understand the meaning, but somehow I still don't always see them. I still frequently get complained at by webforms for not filling stuff in.

So again; this solution is awesome.

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