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I'm about to place one text field in the log in area where user can enter email address and password for logging in, but I'm confused which text should I use for label and placeholder text?

Here are some examples where I found some different ideas.

Gmail:

  • Only placeholder with text "Email"

Yahoo Mail:

  • Only placeholder with text "Yahoo ID"

Outlook.com:

Which one should I use? Only placeholder, or with label?

Also, a couple more question. If I use label, should the text and placeholder be "Email", "Email address" or "Enter Your Email", "Enter Your email address"?

Which one is better? "E-mail" or "Email"? Logically E-mail is the right one but somewhere I've also seen "Email" in place of "E-mail".

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4 Answers 4

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I wouldn't use only a placeholder because of the browser support. Not all old browsers support the placeholder! Take a look to this Stackoverflow Question and to this article about placeholder support.

And I wouldn't use the term "Email ID". Many users are confused about the "ID". I also heard many stories about the confusion of the "Yahoo ID".
"Should I insert here an email or a username? Do I have a username on Yahoo?"
Just use "E-Mail". It is simple and clear for all users.

So for me the best practice is to use a label with "E-Mail" and a placeholder with an example Mail:

Mailinput example: E-Mail

Edit
I found an interesting article about your question "Email or E-Mail".
It say that official you should use Email.

A group calling itself the Email Experience Council has declared the official term to be email.

But many famous companys (e.g Microsoft) use also E-Mail. And in my opinion, E-Mail looks even better for me.
But keep your own counse and take a look to the article by The Fiction Desk.

Edit 2
I think I found the mistery of E-Mail / email!
On the english wikipedia, there is a really interesting part about the spelling:

e-mail is the most common form in print, and is recommended by some prominent journalistic and technical style guides. According to Corpus of Contemporary American English data, this is the form that appears most frequently in edited, published American English and British English writing.

email is the most common form used online, and is required by IETF Requests for Comment and working groups and increasingly by style guides. This spelling also appears in most dictionaries.

mail was the form used in the original RFC. The service is referred to as mail and a single piece of electronic mail is called a message.

eMail, capitalizing only the letter M, was common among ARPANET users and the early developers of Unix, CMS, AppleLink, eWorld, AOL, GEnie, and Hotmail.

EMail is a traditional form that has been used in RFCs for the "Author's Address", and is expressly required "for historical reasons".

E-mail is sometimes used, capitalizing the initial letter E as in similar abbreviations like E-piano, E-guitar, A-bomb, H-bomb, and C-section.

Source en.wikipedia

And the reason why I like "E-Mail" the most is, that i'm from Switzerland, where I speak German. And in the German Dictionary, there is "E-Mail" the official version.
Source de.wikipedia

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    As a 24 year y/o E-Mail looks weird. I imagine older people are more used to E-Mail, younger folks are more used to email.
    – VoronoiPotato
    Commented Jan 20, 2014 at 14:19
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    I'm 18 yrs old and for me, E-Mail looks better. IMO, it is a matter of taste.
    – Michael Schmidt
    Commented Jan 20, 2014 at 14:25
  • It's a matter of what you're exposed to. Taste has nothing to do with what you expect to see when you see a word. :) Now we need to find why you've seen E-Mail and I've seen Email. All of my newsletters use the word email, or simply 'mail'. Searching for e-mail resulted in did you mean email? So I definitely think that it's more common in conversation to use email rather than e-mail. Do you have any example other than microsoft that uses e-mail instead of email?
    – VoronoiPotato
    Commented Jan 20, 2014 at 14:34
  • I just read your attached article, 2/10 use e-mail consistently, and they're historically very formal corporate personas.
    – VoronoiPotato
    Commented Jan 20, 2014 at 14:40
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    Interesting! good investigative work
    – VoronoiPotato
    Commented Jan 21, 2014 at 13:30
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I don't believe there is any 100% consensus on this, though I maybe wrong.

My personal recommendation is to have the label and text field separate, unlike the examples given. My reasoning for this is if your computer auto-saves your credentials then this means there is no label to the form.

In terms of labels "ID" is a grey area. Again personally I would go with "Email" or "Your Email" depending on the tone of your website.

This article has a good bit of information about placement of form fields, though not directly related to you're question

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This is a good jQuery library for placeholder. You can use it for browsers placeholder back compatibility.

  1. I think is better "Email" than "Email ID". The "ID" can confuse users.
  2. The login form is now a standard in the culture of the Internet users. So, if you need, you can use only the placeholder (see the jquery library above for compatibility).
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The issue with using "email" is that "Email" (note the capital E) is also a German word, meaning "enamel." Of course, context is everything and it's unlikely that any German-speaking person is going to think to themselves "Deschalb wird diese Website zu fragen mich, meine Email eingeben?" (Why is this website asked me to enter my enamel?) but it's still something to consider. That's why "E-mail" is the preferred option on German speaking websites.

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