Most users, however, will not bother to look around - they will simply make assumptions. But that takes time and interaction cost - and, again, why would you make it harder for your users to fill in the form? So, what happens when user fill out the form? How do they know whether a field is required? Well, the more-diligent users will look around trying to figure it out - they will scan the form and find a field that is marked optional (sometimes scrolling the page, like in the American Express example above, where the first optional field appears below the mobile fold) if they do find one, they will assume that anything not marked is required. We’ve seen that, whether you include instructions at the top of the form or not, the result is likely to be the same - people will ignore or forget them.
People don’t read instructions at the top of forms.What’s wrong with these approaches? There are a few problems: In both forms, only optional fields were marked: in the case of Citibank with the somewhat unclear abbreviation opt. (In some rare situations, they don’t do anything: they simply assume users will magically know what fields are required if they don’t, then they will just have to deal with the resulting error.) Citicards’ credit-card application (left) included small-font italic instructions All fields are required unless specified optional at the top of its form American Express’s form (right) had no instructions at all. They mark the optional fields, since they are usually fewer.They show instructions at the top of the form saying All fields are required or All fields are required unless otherwise indicated.So, they usually adopt one or both of the following strategies: Often designers feel that the having a marker for every single required field is repetitive, ugly, takes too much space, and, with longer forms, may even seem oppressive (the form requires so much from the user!).
The Temptation to Not Mark the Required Fields And I’ll spend the rest of the article explaining why. A common question in many of our UX Conference classes is: should you mark the required fields in a form? If most fields in the form are required, should we still mark them? (That’s a lot of marks, after all.) The short answer is yes.