Should Forms Auto Submit (Auto Advance) When Questions Are Correctly Filled In?

Question

Here's my form.

Now, I'm curious if I could remove the 'Continue' button and just have the form move to the next stage when someone correctly fills everything in.

This is a bit different than When is an auto-saving form appropriate?- because there's more questions to answer.

Here is another, similar, question but is a different context: Auto Advance to Next Field

Suggestions?

Answer 1

There is a difference between auto-saving and auto-advancing, so I wouldn't necessarily prescribe the benefits of one to the other in terms of user experience and usability.

The problem with auto-advancing is that you are removing control from the user. Users like to feel like they are in control. If the form starts to advance them through the workflow before they "feel" they are ready, they are going to feel a lack of control:

Most flame wars you read about user interface issues focus on the wrong thing. Windows is better because it gives you more ways to resize the window. So what? That's missing the point. The point is, does the UI respond to the user in the way in which the user expected it to respond? If it didn't, the user is going to feel helpless and out of control, the same way I felt when the wheels of the dough bathtub didn't turn the way I pushed them, and I bumped into a wall. Bonk.

UI is important because it affects the feelings, the emotions, and the mood of your users. If the UI is wrong and the user feels like they can't control your software, they literally won't be happy and they'll blame it on your software. If the UI is smart and things work the way the user expected them to work, they will be cheerful as they manage to accomplish small goals. Hey! I ripped a CD! It just worked! Nice software! Wooooooooooo!

To make people happy, you have to let them feel like they are in control of their environment. To do this, you need to correctly interpret their actions. The interface needs to behave in the way they are expecting it to behave.

Thus, the cardinal axiom of all user interface design:

A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.

As Hillel said, everything else is commentary. All the other rules of good UI design are just corollaries.

Source: Controlling Your Environment Makes You Happy by Joel Spolsky

The other problem beyond how the user feels about the experience is that you do not necessarily know that what the user entered is correct. It may be valid according to your regular expressions and form validation, but it might not be what the user intends to enter. If the form advances as soon as they have entered valid data you are taking away their ability to review to ensure it is correct data.

Giving them a button allows them the ability to review, plus it gives them the sense of control that they are using the form instead of the form using them.

Answer 2

Bad idea, for at least 2 reasons

• you take away control from the user
• even if your validator says the fields are correct, the user might have made a typo somewhere and has no chance to see it before moving to next section

Answer 3

I agree with the accepted answer, that:

• You take away control from the user
• Even if your validator says the fields are correct, the user might have made a typo somewhere and has no chance to see it before moving to next section

Something else to note as well is that the user will not always complete the form fields in order.

In your example above, what happens if someone answers the radio buttons first because it takes one click, and fills in their name last? There is no foolproof way to ensure that someone has finished entering text into a text field, and leaves more questions than answers.

When would the form submit? When one character is entered? When the person tabs out of that field? If it submitted on tab out, what happens when a person leaves the cursor in the field while looking for the submit button?

While auto-validation and auto-saving work well, auto-submission is something that doesn't lend itself to being good UX.

Answer 4

Don't do this.

1. It doesn't make sense at all for many common form inputs. Any text fields or multi-select controls (checkbox lists, multi-select lists boxes), sliders, number spinners, or other free-form input simply doesn't have an obvious "done" state. Sure, you could make a regex that waits for a ".com" or ".edu" or ".org" or ".co.uk" or... at the end of an email text box, but...
2. It doesn't allow a user to process what they just typed into the input before it begins processing, so if they enter [email protected] they probably won't even have the time to see the typo before you advance the form. Even if you set a timer, you're going to have to set a timer that allows for the slowest hunt-and-peck typist to find their place and review what they entered.
3. All fields on your form must be required, of course. Because otherwise you can't tell if a field has not been filled out yet or will not be filled out.
4. What about people who like to review a form before they advance? You are actually punishing people who are trying to make sure the data they give you is correct.
5. Have you ever, ever seen a user be happy when a page turns without them hitting a button and telling it to do so? Would you be happy to be filling out a form and have it disappear while you are filling it out?
6. Along the same lines, users do not like when their expectations are violated. So, even IF all of the above were not true, even IF there were some benefit to doing this, you're going to be making users unhappy by doing things that they are not expecting you to do. With their data in the form, no less.

Best case scenario, you have a form with only dropdowns and radio buttons and you have users who do not make mistakes in answering or mousing (obviously a touch screen would be a nightmare), but at the same time have no prior expectations to how online data entry works. What benefit do you gain by taking the time/cost to implement this? One button click per page.

Answer 5

I would say NO and here's why:

1. How would the form know if all the data was correct?

   a. The form wouldn't, the user would, but a form could know if they were valid.

   b. Users like to look things over to make sure everything is correct prior to continuing on.

2. Based on the above, how would the form know when to auto-advance?

   a. The only way the form could know is if all fields were required.

3. How would you get back to the prior step if you were continually auto-advancing?

Answer 6

2 main UX problems I see:

1) Potential to tap on the wrong radio button on the last step, especially on mobile.

2) Also in Luke W's book he talks about how users enjoy reviewing a form briefly before clicking the continue/submit button. You'd remove their opportunity to do that.

Answer 7

No you should not. Mechanisms like this have been abused in the past by programmers of malicious dialers:

(source, a German Forum about computer fraud)

Once the user entered the letters OK the dialer would connect to an expensive telephone number (it says 29 Euros per connection here) and the field would be locked in that state.

While those dialers are no longer seen in the wild today auto advancing forms may remind older people of those dialers.