Why heuristics are only rules of thumb: the case of the disabled button

Most user experience designers will be familiar with Jackob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics. They are widely cited and a great set of broad rules of thumb to follow when designing user interfaces.

Heuristic number five is error prevention:

‘Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place.’

Sounds sensible right? Well not always, sometimes it is better to let users make errors and give appropriate feedback. Let’s bring the disabled button on forms to the floor.

We will start by setting the scene: you are designing a form that has several required fields. You indicate this clearly on the form so hopefully most users will notice. You are striving to create a better user experience. Thinking about error prevention you decide to disable the ‘submit’ button until the user has completed the form preventing them from making an error by submitting an incomplete form. All good? Well no.

Disabled button on eBay’s sign up form

Disabling buttons is an anti-pattern

When we disable a button on a form we are often disabling the call-to-action. Yes, that thing on the page we trying…