Form Fail
I had to fill out a web form today with information about my college degrees. It looked something like this:
* Start Date is the date you earned your degree
Start Date [ ]
*Please DO NOT enter End Date
End Date [ ]
I’ve seen a lot of poorly designed forms, but this one takes the cake. First of all, why would you label a field “Start Date” when it is for entry of the date at which you finished something? Why not just label the field “Date degree was granted” or “Graduation Date”? Secondly, why would you include a field in the form that you don’t want anyone to fill out? Finally, if you have to include these instructions, and you go to the effort of implementing them in the HTML, shouldn’t that clue you into the fact that your from sucks? In the time it takes to type in the instructions, you could have relabeled the first field and deleted the second.
