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"Submit Button Guidelines
Place the Submit button at the end of the form, at the bottom. There is a quirky user behavior called button gravity11 that causes users to scroll to the bottom of the form to find the Submit button, like a dropped apple heading toward the ground. Take advantage of this; place submit where people will look for it.
Tell people if they can’t back out. If this is the last button they have to push to buy the 1969 copy of Murder and the Married Virgin on Abe’s Rare Books site, for gosh sakes, warn them. If they are about to delete e-mail from those heady, premarriage dating days that they’ve been hiding on a private web mail account, warn them. Submitting a form should never be a horrible surprise. If you can’t provide an undo, let people know there is no turning back.
Give people a button. Many sites now use JavaScript to submit the form for you. You select an item from a drop-down list and you are whisked away to a page. This is bad news for a couple of reasons. A percentage of users turn off JavaScript because they consider it a security risk.12 It’s not a huge number, but it may be enough to cause trouble if you don’t provide a button. Also, as I stated earlier, many users “slip” on drop-down lists. Using JavaScript to autosubmit means that not only do you have to reselect your choice, you now have to hit the Back button first. Remove the submit button only after careful consideration of your audience.
Call it something other than “submit.” “Submit” is what the invading aliens say shortly before “Take me to your leader.” Label it with the function of the button. If it logs a user in, call it "Log In". If it registers a user, call it "Register". If it submits the credit card for a purchase, call it "Buy Now". Be literal.
11. Jared M. Spool et al., 1999, Web Site Usability: A Designer’s Guide, Morgan-
Kaufmann Publishers, pp. 79–81.
12. Go ask your friendly neighborhood engineer about it. I bet she’s got JavaScript
turned off as well. "
=v= Gee whiz, if I was a woman, I'd think footnote #12 was just for me!
Submitting a form should never be a horrible surprise.
Some personal websites have a link to a "Rate This Site" webpage. Once there, you can rate the site you just came from. That's fine and good. But it's annoying--as happens with at least one rating service--when clicking on the link itself counts as a "Yes, this is my favorite site!" vote. *That* was a surprise.
Great book! When are you going to write the next one??? Now that you've covered the basics...what about some advanced material?
My husband has told me if I write another book, he'll divorce me.
I'm going over much of this, though in some more detail at UIE 8 as well as what I hope will be a super great minitalk on professional effectiveness for designers, which is my latest obsession.