March 17, 2004
Clear!
I don't get "Clear" or "Rest Form" buttons on the average web form.
When have you ever gotten finished filling in all the necessary fields on a form and said to yourself, "Shit. I just entered completely incorrect information into that form. I need to wipe everything and start over."?
And the information one is usually entering into a form is one's contact information. How often does one mess this up? Entirely and to the point that the easiest way of fixing the problem is to do it again from scratch?
Do you expect that even once someone has not only entered in completely unsuitable (or even specious) information but only realized this at the very end of the process? How often do you type information into a form without regard to it's accuracy and only check it for errors when you are finished? This just isn't they way it's done.
More often these buttons are probably only ever clicked accidentally with an errant click or because the user blindly thinks it is the submit button.
May favorite occurences of these exhaustively dysfunctionally-used buttons is when I see them with one-item forms, such as an enewsletter sign-up form which only requests one's email address. If I were to make a mistake, pressing a separate button to clear my entry would actually be made harder (in a relative sense, of course) by way of adding a click to the process. This extra click with my mouse would also require me to take my hands off my keyboard - where they had to have been for me to provide the proper information.
It's just not happening, people. There is no need to reset a form right before one would likely be going to there submit the form.
Now, I'm not just one to bitch and moan about something without offering a solution. If you don't want to waste the brain cells that are holding the <HTML code> for a clear button, how about pre-filling all your form fields with sample data for the user to peruse and putting that button at the top of the form?
Now that's a clear button I could love!
Disclaimer: I am referring to only the average web form in this tirade. I have seen excellent uses of clear buttons on forms in web applications and their ilk.
Posted by jtnt at March 17, 2004 11:16 PM in Web Development