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Dear Internet: Take the reset buttons off your damn forms

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Re: Dear Internet: Take the reset buttons off your damn forms

#61

Post by gavinballard »

socillion wrote: post #18

A similar annoyance is writing a well-thought out forum post, pressing submit, and being told in some way that your session has expired. Some sites you can go back to retrieve your post, others will just present you with a newly empty form.

One of my biggest pet peeves are forms that make you enter your address information, including your "ZIP Code", before asking for your country. Extra annoyance points go to sites that then do a clunky page refresh after selecting a different country and having all of your previous address information disappear into the void.

Re: Dear Internet: Take the reset buttons off your damn forms

#62

Post by f00li5h »

fr0sty wrote: post #46
socillion wrote: post #18

A similar annoyance is writing a well-thought out forum post, pressing submit, and being told in some way that your session has expired. Some sites you can go back to retrieve your post, others will just present you with a newly empty form.

Another favorite of mine is the forums that have a 'quick reply' box on a thread with a giant "Post Reply" button just above it and a smaller "post quick reply" button at the bottom right. Guess which button throws away all of your work.

both!

Re: Dear Internet: Take the reset buttons off your damn forms

#64

Post by Semiapies »

Reset buttons can be useful in CRUD applications when you want to "clear all changes" in an existing record - everything gets reverted to the field values in the HTML.

Admittedly, I don't use them much, usually going with a "Cancel/Close" link that takes the user out of the record-editing view.

Re: Dear Internet: Take the reset buttons off your damn forms

#65

Post by r00fus »

bradleyland wrote: post #58
frankiejr wrote: post #53

I used to think exactly the way the author did. I'd actually get agitated when I had to explain to the IA/Design departments again why this was such a bad idea. I won about half the time, usually with my argument driven solely by my ego. Being vehemently against any use of it under any condition I refused to accept that there was any appropriate use for it. Then, I actually did some research. First, there are instanc…

That's the problem with absolutes. Any time you pre-decide that something is always good/bad, you're going to have to eat your words at some point.

Which is why, couching phrases in neutral terminology is always best:

unproductive) Microsoft on the server sucks!

productive) Microsoft software is expensive and nobody here is an MS-expert, migrating will cost considerable time and money without any real benefit.

Re: Dear Internet: Take the reset buttons off your damn forms

#66

Post by r00fus »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #30
socillion wrote: post #18

A similar annoyance is writing a well-thought out forum post, pressing submit, and being told in some way that your session has expired. Some sites you can go back to retrieve your post, others will just present you with a newly empty form.

I'm assuming this is levelled at HN? It's probably the only forum I use regularly where I get timeout's on submission. And the timeout page isn't even friendly either.

HN (and trac) handle the situation best: they don't invalidate the page data, so your post will still be there. You CTRL/CMD A+C then get back to your posting with a refreshed cookie/session.

Many other forums basically wipe out your post, which is highly frustrating.

Re: Dear Internet: Take the reset buttons off your damn forms

#67

Post by r00fus »

Semiapies wrote: post #64

Reset buttons can be useful in CRUD applications when you want to "clear all changes" in an existing record - everything gets reverted to the field values in the HTML. Admittedly, I don't use them much, usually going with a "Cancel/Close" link that takes the user out of the record-editing view.

Isn't this more of a "revert changes"?

Re: Dear Internet: Take the reset buttons off your damn forms

#68

Post by Chocobean »

gavinballard wrote: post #61
socillion wrote: post #18

A similar annoyance is writing a well-thought out forum post, pressing submit, and being told in some way that your session has expired. Some sites you can go back to retrieve your post, others will just present you with a newly empty form.

One of my biggest pet peeves are forms that make you enter your address information, including your "ZIP Code", before asking for your country. Extra annoyance points go to sites that then do a clunky page refresh after selecting a different country and having all of your previous address information disappear into the void.

there's simply no reason why they can't either a) parse the zip code differently based on country, or b) why country isn't listed first if there are uncrossable chasms. To do neither is simply laziness

Re: Dear Internet: Take the reset buttons off your damn forms

#70

Post by r00fus »

joshuaheard wrote: post #55

There's only one thing worse than having a Reset button: putting it next to the Save button http://public.bay.livefilestore.com/y1pmfh3uGxAv9cSUByhqbbSC...

The most sad thing there is that "Start Over" is, by Fitt's Law, a "larger" button in the sense that it's occupying an edge.

It's like a poorly designed roadway section that just happens to cause more accidents. Bad Engineering.

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