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I am questioning the use, in web form design, of reset buttons placed along with "Submit" or "Finish" buttons.

What happens if a user accidentally clicks on "Reset" button after filling up all required fields?

Even though we can put confirmation message before clearing up all filled data, but I don't want to have unnecessary user interaction probably clicks and all.

If user wants to refill the filled data, s/he can start override by using tabs, right?

Am I harming any user experience by avoiding "Reset" button?

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5 Answers 5

Reset to default
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TLDR: No, it won't hurt user experience.

The situation that a person needs to reset the entire form, is actually quite rare. The situation in which a person accidentally presses reset, when looking for a confirmation button instead, happens pretty often though.

When this happens, users get annoyed. It can even lead to them not finishing your form, because they don't want to fill in the entire form again.

For more reasoning, I would suggest reading the top comment on this question, or this post on the website of Nielson Norman Group.

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I think the only situation where a Reset button might help the user is when you've pre-populated a form with a set of default values (possibly copied from another form based on some assumptions). In all other cases it adds an additional choice that is most likely to be unnecessary and unintentional, with unfortunate results.

An alternative interface you might consider is adding field-level "clear" actions that provide a shortcut to clear individual fields:

enter image description here

If you really wanted to put in the effort, you could build in some sort of logic that detects user intent. For example, if the user has cleared 2-3 fields in a row, only then pop up a tooltip or something that provides an option for clearing the whole form.

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  • Love these ideas!
    – Mo'ath
    Commented Jun 5, 2018 at 16:09
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In a Web Form it would be better if virtually all Reset buttons were removed. This button almost never helps to improve UX, but often hurts them.

The worst problem about Reset is if users click the button by mistake when they wanted to click Submit. Oops! All text deleted!

So its easy to explain why nowadays Reset is no longer required. We can also add a confirmation before reset.

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It is a trade-off . You can think of situations where the accidentally presses the 'Reset' button , but we can also think about the user needs to clear all the fields. All the catastrophic scenarios inherently implies the placement of the Reset button near the Submit button. My advise : keep the Reset button and keep it away from the Submit button .

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  • I don't see the trade-off. It's all extra inconvenience while not having any extra advantage. You say "we can also think about [when] the user needs to clear all the fields". Well, you mean... as in NEVER? Why would a user want to throw to the trash all of his/her work filling the form, when most probably he/she only wants to correct a single field or two? It doesn't make sense to have it. It's never useful and always a problem, an extra choice no one needs. Not putting the Submit and Reset buttons together is not enough. Even then, the user can click the wrong button when in a hurry.
    – OMA
    Commented Sep 2, 2019 at 16:55
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Sometimes reset buttons don't look like reset buttons.

It's pretty easy to use them as a cancel button, and listen for the reset event. Of course, you'd probably want to confirm that the user is intentionally discarding changes, but that's more of an implementation detail.

This site uses a cancel button (it's a link actually), and I bet you never had trouble with it.

stackoverflow's cancel link next to seve edits button

That's not to say that <input type="reset"> is appropriate for all forms. It's usually unnecessary, but sometimes it's helpful.

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