Required Elements

Forcing the form user to make an entry into certain fields is an often necessary evil of webforms.

On the one hand, receiving a form submittal where the user’s name field (for example) is empty isn’t very useful, so the judicious use of “required” fields can help assure that usable forms are submitted.

On the other hand, people tend to go overboard with required fields – we often have customers tell us they want every single field to be required. We usually try to come to a compromise; having an entry in every single field is often not really necessary, and sometimes a user may just not know what to enter into a particular field and shouldn’t be penalized by making the form become unsubmittable. What often happens next is the user abandons the form, and you’ve just lost a potential client.

Our thought is that you should identify which fields are absolutely necessary and then we’ll make them required. This keeps the amount of red asterisks all over your form to a minimum (another form abandonment cause).

Speaking of that, if you must have a large number of required fields, it’s sometimes wise to have us just mark all the other fields as “optional” and forget the red asterisks…