User Experience Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for user experience researchers and experts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
In a form indicating which fields are required are often indicated by an asterisk (*). We have an editable table and I indicate a required column with aesthetics in the title of the column.
The problem appears when initially no columns are required. But if the user fills one of the fields in the row, the next field in this row becomes mandatory and will not pass validation when the user will save the form. How to help the user and identify conditionally required fields?
Can you highlight fields when required? Or even use progressive disclosure to focus people on what is needed (as in gif below).
As a side note: asterisks should only be used if most fields are optional. If most fields are required, optional fields should be indicated by adding (optional) after the field instead.
I was thinking about the usability of this case. Try comibining Progressive disclouse to focus the next interaction to be done by the use as @Steve O'Connor rightly said.
Assuming there can be multiple rows like this, it looks pretty bad of field level indicators of optional/required labels are given. So, generalizing the case would looks sometihng like this
Multiple rows
It is a powerful signifier for the user too not letting user do an action and then wait for an error essentially saving that 5 - 10 seconds of doing the task again where the whole user behaviour of rejection/frustration is accounted.
Hope this helps. Thanks
