I was catching up on Kitty Giraudel's latest article, The required fault in our stars.
In a nutshell, it explores ways to improve accessibility for the classic web pattern of adding an asterisk (*) to a required input's label:
I won't go into the suggested solutions themselves—the article covers these.
BUT! To me, this seems like an engineering solution to a design problem: why ask users for information that is, by definition, not necessary?
Some examples:
- Asking for an optional middle name during signup: don't unless necessary (not everyone has these). Anyways, prefer a single "full name" input.
- Asking for an optional email address to subscribe to a newsletter: instead, start by asking "do you want to subscribe to our newsletter?" and make the email input required if the user answers "yes".
- Asking for an optional zip code during signup to receive updates about nearby events: don't—let users opt into event notifications separately, after signup.
I can only think of very few case where optional inputs make sense:
- Address line 2: lets users enter an apartment number, c/o or the like.
And to cover these rare cases, adding an "(optional)" suffix to the label seems a better choice than adding an asterisk to every other field.
In other words:
Keep it short. [...] Remove fields which collect information that can be (a) derived in some other way, (b) collected more conveniently at a later date, or (c) simply omitted. Every time you cut a field or question from a form, you increase its conversion rate — the business case for this guideline is that simple.
Web Forms Usability, Norman Nielsen Group