Tuesday, December 20, 2016

usability - Behavior of the Enter button in a form


What is a better experience for a user if they press enter when using a form? Should it submit the form or move to the next field?



Answer



Hitting enter should be the same as pressing the submit-button. However there are different schools in wheter or not to use this technique: FORM submission and the ENTER key?



There seems to be some confusion/disagreement among browser developers as to whether a Submit control is a "successful control" (in the terms of e.g the HTML4 specification) when a form is submitted by means of Enter.




It's quite an old article, yes, but this reasoning is still true.


One could always leave this desicion to the user, as Facebook does in the messaging services. I think this is really the best way to go - since every user are different, have different needs and experience. Do this and you have my blessing:


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Moving between fields in a form are usually done with the tab key. In HTML you can set in which order you move between field using the attribute tabindex in an input field.


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