More and more commonly, I find that websites elect to hide or remove the submit button from forms. One obvious example is this site (along with other StackExchange sites), whose search field lacks a button labeled "Search" or "Go".
As a user who rarely uses his mouse to fill out forms, this isn't an issue for me. In fact, I often prefer the cleaner look of search forms without it. However, I imagine that it might cause confusion for certain types of users (e.g. those who click the "Google Search" button instead of pressing enter).
My sense is that this becomes more and more problematic as the number of fields increases. For example, a login form with two fields might occasionally do without the submit button, but a registration form with ten fields probably shouldn't.
Can someone point me to any research to back up or debunk my claim? Or for those of you that skipped the first three paragraphs of my question, how is usability affected by removing the submit button from various types of forms?
Answer
How is usability affected by removing the submit button.
Well duh - it doesn't exactly improve things in terms of usability, let's say.
It might make for cleaner looks, but how far do you go in order to make your website look minimal - remove all action buttons? Minimal is not synonymous with usable.
I'm not saying people can't figure it out for the most part, but then that's not designing for all users. Stack Exchange maybe get away with it more than most, but for websites with a very wide range of users, there's no excuse for not having the button. Why would you want to deliberately alienate a minority of users?
And to not have the button on a form with more than one input is worse. It's a matter of mindset:
When you have one input you can see that when you've completed that field your are done. What next? No button? Let's press return and see if that works instead. (Watch it - you're making the user think about what to do.)
When you have multiple fields - whether you click or use tabs, you move from one thing to the next. You are in step mode. When you are done with one input, you move to the next. The more fields you have, the more you get in the 'complete this and move to the next step' frame of mind. Thus the greater the 'surprise' when you get to the last field and there is no next step (missing button). Frankly, that would be insane and no amount of explanation about trying to get clean looks is going to wash.
You want research? Watch my mum!
And anyway, what happens on mobile - find me the return key there!
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