Whoa. I haven’t done this in a while…but this is something that really irks me.
When you have a form, please, please refrain from putting a Reset button on it. It’s not necessary, and it’s irritating. Filled in a long form (which, by itself is bad practice), and ready to submit it? Oops! You clicked Reset instead of Submit! You have to start over. I hate it.
If you really do want to have an alternate action, label it something like Cancel (Reset is confusing) and be sure to differentiate it from the submit button, so it can in no possible way be mistaken for something it’s not.
Better yet, leave it out. It’s a form, it’s meant to be submitted.
Yesterday, I logged into my medical aid’s web services portal. The horror.
I have no idea where they dug up the person that put this together. What’s wrong with it, you ask? Where to start?!
- It’s fugly
- Buttons seem to be placed all over the place at random
- You think it’s a button, but then it’s not (no way to distinguish between a button and a label)
- Button labels aren’t very helpful, what the hell is the “P” for in “Claims - P”?
- When you eventually click on a button, you have no idea how to get back to where you came from…it’s a navigational nightmare
This web app is in dire need of an overhaul.
They need an experienced information architect to put together an intuitive layout, clear navigation, and descriptive button labels. Get rid of the jargon. Make this accessible to the masses, not just a select group of experts.
Search boxes (or any form) with no submit button. Hmmm. A tough one, this…
Actually, no. It’s quite straightforward. Do it right, or don’t do it at all. Reddit here has done it wrong. If you look at their source, they’ve got a form with a single text input. The only way to submit that form is by pressing return / enter. If you look to the left, this means that there’s no graceful degradation.
From an accessibility point of view, this means that people with screen readers will know there’s a form, but they won’t have any idea how to submit it, people with no keyboards (using some other kind of input) are SOL.
The right way to do it? Include your button, but hide it using CSS (setting the position as absolute and giving it an x-value of something like -99999px). This way, when CSS is ignored, it’ll be exactly where it should be.
Even better: leave it be. Buttons are a call to action. Submit buttons even more so.
Internet Explorer 8 was released yesterday. That’s one more version that IE6 is getting pushed backed. There is, in fact, no reason at all to still be using it in this day and age.
(Buy the shirt here)
