Don’t default to ‘please select’ in drop-downs
And only use defaults when applicable to most users.
Here’s the name field entry from British Airways’ Executive Club registration form.
Here’s the equivalent for Virgin Atlantic
Note that the drop-down for ‘title’ is blank for BA, but has ‘please select’ for VA. Users don’t need to be told to ‘please select’ if there’s a field that’s empty. There may have been a day when people were not used to drop-downs, and didn’t know what to do with them, but that’s not the case any more, for the vast majority of users.
Even more importantly though, users scan forms looking for empty fields. As people, we don’t methodically work through all the field names, picking them out from all the other clutter on the page. We take the easy lazy route. Which fields are blank? We don’t do this consciously, but we’re surprised when we hit the ‘enter’ button, and get an error. I have observed this often enough in usability testing. Even worse on the VA form, I have no idea why they would duplicate the field names in the input fields.
Further down on the BA page, we find a couple of fields that have been defaulted. The ‘country of residence’ and ‘language’ fields.
In this case, it’s reasonable to default, as on entering the site the user has had to accept or change their country and language settings. The vast majority of users won’t change these fields, and so it would just be annoying for them to have to apply a setting that they’ve already done. Moreover, anyone who happens to want to change these entries, is likely to notice the disconnect with what they want. Again, it can be an unconscious thing.
Just by way of another example, here are some fields from the UK organ donor site. Right in the middle of a lengthy form, we find ‘please select’ again. The user just wants to get the thing done, and this sort of thing in the middle of a form increases the risk of errors.
Check your forms. Are you leaving fields blank when they should be, and thinking intelligently about what to default? You should also be looking at your form analytics, and seeing which fields cause the most errors, so you know what to fix.
Originally published at nickgassman.com on December 13, 2017.
