Marking Required Fields in Forms

https://gyazo.com/a24406e0cef4d5244834d0e61880f4c0

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.

People don’t read instructions at the top of forms.

Even if people read instructions, they may forget them.

And even if people don’t forget the instruction, you’re increasing their cognitive load by having them commit it to their working memory.

if they do find one, they will assume that anything not marked is required. But that takes time and interaction cost — and, again, why would you make it harder for your users to fill in the form?

The solution is simple: mark all the required fields. Be as explicit and transparent as possible: for every single field that must be completed, mark it as required.

That is unlikely to make a practical difference, but one reason to put it just before the field description is to help the eyes easily locate which fields are required by scanning just the left-most character of the label.

While red is somewhat recommended, we have a strong recommendation to avoid pale grays or low-contrast colors for the asterisk.

While it’s not obligatory, marking the optional fields does lighten the user’s cognitive load: in the absence of that word, the user must look around and infer that the field is optional based on the other fields being marked as required.

It is, however, dangerous to not mark the required fields in a registration form.