Clearly identifying optional questions on forms

[md0u80c9]

Hi,

There are lots of ways to do this but it's probably not as straightforwards as it sounds.

My forms now have optional and mandatory fields within them.

One problem is that it's not easy to identify which form items are optional and which are mandatory.

As a workaround, it is possible to add some asterisks to form item titles and suchlike to indicate mandatory fields.

However, I think it would be best placed if the cell layouts within the form themselves identified to the user which form items were optional and which were compulsory.

[umerkhan-apple]

@md0u80c9 I very much agree with this post. I will look into this and see what the best way is to indicate optional and required items.

If we don't use asterisk, do you have any recommendations or ideas on how to best place it in the cell layout?

[md0u80c9]

Some thoughts I've had so far with regard to the forms:

• Append a red * to an (attributed) string and put a footnote above the 'Next' / 'Done' button that * indicates mandatory items.
• Use a smaller (half-height) font (and possibly a different colour, eg. blue) and append (optional) to the question title to indicate optionality.

Another thought I had in terms of question user-friendliness. For some forms, some question items may need more verbose explanations or clarifications for 'new' users, which may otherwise be intrusive to experienced users.

One neat solution around that (may need a separate Issue opening - but they are interlinked in that optionality is one such clarification) would be to use Force touch. If you force touch on the question item on the form, we could use that to trigger a row deletion of the answer options, and a row insertion of an 'explanation' cell. The generated cell could have a 'long-form explanation' on it. Release force-touch and the information cell slides away (animated deletion), and the answer options appear.

Again I'm coming at this from the domain of 'professional' user or recurrent user of a survey, rather than a 'use once, fire-and-forget' survey (I'm dealing with both sets of people - and successful medical research will have to take both professional inputs and patient inputs). As an example - try doing an online tax return (HMRC's site in the UK). You get lots of detailed questions about what you should and shouldn't include. We could provide that extra information via force touch. For the pre-iPhone 6S users you could use a blue circle with an i and then offer the same function from there but this may 'clutter' the display a little.