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I'm designing a form to create violations of employees from various departments. For quicker choosing the employee, I have a field for users to filter the department that the employee is from.

Value of Department field are:

  • All (default value)
  • Department 1
  • Department 2
  • Department 3

My question is:
Should the Department field be marked as mandatory in this form?

Thank you

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  • But Department isn't a required field right? It is not part of the form and there is always a value selected. Think about what happens when the employee is filled in and the user decides to choose the right department afterwards "because it is required", will that reset the employee field? Department is a filter for Employee, so maybe make that clearer.
    – jazZRo
    Commented May 9, 2022 at 13:32
  • Yes, Department isn't a required field, it's just a filter for users to filter employees quicker (in case users want to narrow down options in the Employees' value list). When the value in the Employee field is filled, the value in the Department field is automatically set to the department of the selected employee.
    – user157319
    Commented May 17, 2022 at 8:47
  • Please fix the typo in the title of this question ("in" -> "if")
    – Martin Kealey
    Commented Feb 6, 2023 at 1:49

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
1

Keep it optional. It's not a requirement (such as if you were to automatically send an email to the department head, or allow it to be run in a report), just a filter. Marking it required would communicate that there's something important about it, and make the reporting user feel a need to remember the department, which they might not know offhand. If it's not important... don't require it.

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0

For transparency and consistency (if this field is required) I would mark it same as the others.

IMO you should take a closer look on consistency in general. For the Date an Description the files are empty, for Department the value is pre-selected, and for Employee there you have placeholder.

Also with only 3 possible departments maybe it would be possible to use chips selection instead of drop-down.

material chips

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