I'm looking at a system that's heavy on data entry. On most forms, only some of the fields are required. On some of these forms, whether items are required is dependant on what another item is set to.
For a pretend example: There are fields for "Preferred contact method" and "Phone number". If you select "Phone" for the preferred contact method, you MUST enter a phone number. If you select "E-mail" for the preferred contact method, you CAN enter a phone number, but you don't have to. So, given that we are using asterisks (*) to represent required fields, it seems to me that we could: (a) add/remove the asterisk as the field becomes required or not required (b) not use an asterisk for field that are conditional (c) not change the asterisk once it has initially been placed It seems to me that the advantage of (a) is that the user would be able to build a model of how one things relate to the others (the relationships are made quite explicit) and at any given time you'd be able to see which fields were required. A downside is that you'd have the visual disturbance of the screen changing, and the user might not necessarily be able to deduce the reason behind it. The other two raise the spectre of the asterisks not being accurate at all times, which makes me a bit uncomfortable, and could undermine the trust the user has in those indicators. On the plus side, each given screen would be consistent. Does anyone have any views/experience of this? What have you done in similar circumstances? Thanks, Chris. ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
