The User Interface Design of Form Buttons
Inspired by a uxmovement blog post
The traditional user interface design convention of completing forms is by clicking a “Submit” button. The use of the word submit is a logical one because it describes what the system does when a user fills in a form. I find this type of terminology to have been more pertinent the further back in time one goes. In the past, particularly before the advent of graphical user interface designs, the average computer user tended to be engineers or technophiles. For such a person the vagueness of the word submit would not be that great. Today, however, computer users represent virtually all strata of mankind. The most successful computing products, websites, and applications today accordingly adopt a user-centered user interface design approach. iPhone, Amazon, Facebook, and Spotify (the music streaming tool) are all testament to this, with all of them great user interface design and usability.
The main problem with the wording of “submit” is that it is not user-centered enough. Sure users do submit their completed forms but they do so in the context of a specific task. Having the call-to-action affirm the current task in its user interface design lives up to Steve Krug’s first law of usability thus focusing on completing tasks. Examples of task specific labeling that can be applied to submit buttons include Create Account, Send Message, Subscribe Now, and Register Free. Furthermore implementing these types of buttons into a user interface design is an easy inexpensive process as all it takes is changing a little bit of text. iOS does something similar with the Enter button on the virtual keyboard. When typing in a password for a WiFi connection the word changes to Join and to Search when using a search bar.
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