Menu
On a web contact form, is the reset button really required? Is it really used by anyone? If I don't put it in a page, is there an usability fail?
10x!
552
In electronics and technology, a reset button is a button that can reset a device. On video game consoles, the reset button restarts the game, losing the player's unsaved progress. On personal computers, the reset button clears the memory and reboots the machine forcibly.
Because Back is such a strong behavior on the Web, it is usually not necessary to offer explicit Cancel buttons. If the user asks for something but doesn't want it, then you can be sure that it's Back button time. Offer a Cancel button when users may fear that they have committed to something they want to avoid.
What does the Cancel button do exactly? It dismisses the user's current screen and brings them back to their previous screen. This dismissive button is a safeguard to prevent unwanted changes to the system.
Cancel is a button or option that lets you exit a program or dialog box and not save any of the changes made.
Well, it's very useful to erase that textarea your customer just took the time to write, because they press the wrong button -before they lose it anyway because the session expires, and have to retype-
No, I really don't think it's useful.
148
It's actually sometimes useful for web forms which will be accessed from public terminals - a good example would be a search form for a public library card catalogue.
Imagine if the search form has a lot of fields (author, year, keywords, topic, publisher, collection, title, series, whatever). This lets you do very specific searches (all books by authors named John published in 1987), but once you've found the result you (or another user) may want to do a new search using a very different set of terms (all books about fish published by Random House. A reset button can help a lot here, because you may otherwise find yourself manually clearing a large number of fields.
(Depending on implementation details, a reset button may also be useful if a user doesn't want the next user to see what they were searching for. Again, this is useful in the context of a library, where privacy is a concern.)
34
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
