How important is "autofill" for user experience?

Question

Well I've got the obvious user-form. (Name, address etc).

I notice that google can autofill such a form, which is quite handy. However I also notice that in our case autofill isn't working. nothing is suggested and it stays empty.

Upon further research I learned that google won't autofill the forms if they have any so called "controlled" behaviour below it: an onchange event for example.

In our form we have onchange to "constantly" store the fields on the backend server (if there's a connection, and the last save happened over 400 ms ago). This prevents the need for a "save" button (it's still there for users as an anchor to give them the feeling they commit to the server, as well as a cancel button that restores the old field data).

So what would be better, have an traditional form with "save/commit", "cancel" etc buttons: which allow autofill to automate completion. Or have a managed form which apparently prevents google from autofilling, but allows automated saving (and just hope for google to work someday)?

Answer 1

I think it comes down to the form length. If your form is short, I think the autofill flow would be a better user experience. It minimizes typing and overall time invested. However, if you have a long or paginated form, then you might want to stick with automatically saving state/progress as the effort a user will be investing is greater and a loss of data would be more painful the deeper the user is in the flow.

Also, here is something to consider if you have a short form. If you support autofill do you really need "automated saving"? In a worst-case scenario, if the user's completed fields are lost, he/she could quickly fill them out again with autofill. Again, this is assuming the form is short.