Collate Mandatory Field Format For Free

A common question in many of the trainings I teach is: Should I mark the required fields in a form? If most fields in the form are required, should we still mark them? The short answer is: yes. It's best to have such a specification next to every single required field instead of just having a message such as, "All fields are required," or "All fields are required unless otherwise indicated" at the top of the page... or no message at all. Most of the time, people don't read small or even large font instructions at the top of a form. When they see a form, they often just jump into filling it. Even when people read such instructions, they might forget the instructions if they happen to be interrupted while they fill out the form. You might think that it will be more efficient to just mark the optional fields, since there are fewer. Unfortunately, to determine that a field is required, people will have to scan the entire form and check for any optional fields. That is not going to happen. Instead, they will use common sense to assume which fields are mandatory. And, users' expectations can differ from the designers'. The result may be a form submission error, which will take significant time and interaction cost to address. How should you mark the required fields? The asterisk (*) has become the standard for indicating mandatory fields, and it has the advantage that it does not take that much space. So, use it! Should the asterisk precede or follow the field label? This is unlikely to make a real difference, but one reason to put it just before the field description is to help the eyes easily locate which fields are required by scanning just the left-most character of the label. If the required fields are specified, should you also specify the optional fields? While it's not obligatory, marking the optional fields also does lighten the users' cognitive load. In the absence of that word, the user must look around, and infer that a field is optional based on the other fields being marked as required. If the word optional is next to the field descriptor, that task becomes a tad easier. Not specifying that the field is optional is not a deal-breaker, but doing so is a nice perk.