Bass Ackwards
Avis needs to try harder. On their My Avis sign up page they say:
Please note that information marked with an asterisk (*) is optional.
Virtually every other form on the web does it the other way around. Required fields are indicated (color, bold, asterisk). Tsk, tsk.
April 22nd, 2005 at 4:30 pm
I had a client insist on this once. We had built and hosted a site for one client, who later sold it to another organization. The new owners wanted to make some change to reflect slightly different needs, and in the process they insisted on reversing the required/optional labels on the sign-up form.
April 22nd, 2005 at 7:45 pm
Change for the sake of change. Insanity.
April 22nd, 2005 at 10:06 pm
No, for some reason they seemed to think it made more sense. They even claimed that people were getting confused because they expected asterisks to mark optional fields. (The users were mainly high school students; I’m not sure that that says about their UI expectations.)
April 23rd, 2005 at 3:18 pm
It’s an easy reaction to see something nonstandard and pan it as bad usability. Standards didn’t all evolve out of the very best practices for users. Sometimes it feels like usability is about habit and the past more thant anything. A good, safe bet, but not exactly the same as design.
It wouldn’t hurt to step back and think about the reasoning which *might* have been behind a particular decision. In this way, usability can push design forward — rather and being seen as reactionary. (an occasional criticism).
April 23rd, 2005 at 4:37 pm
Excellent point. Standards and usability often go hand in hand, but not always. The same thing probably applies to popularity and usability.
April 25th, 2005 at 1:30 pm
I spent the better quite some time reviewing all kinds of offline forms. It has become some sort of de-facto Web standard to mark required fields with an asterisk (*). Yet offline forms generally only use asterisks when there’s some kind of note or exception to the field in question. It’s assumed if a question’s there, you’ll answer it unless it’s marked optional.
October 4th, 2005 at 5:50 am
a