Spider Trax

Ordering Submission Buttons In Forms

When presenting users with multiple submission options within a form, what order should they be presented in?

Again, the issue appears to arise with keyboard navigators – who, of course, include screenreader users.

All users prefer to have access to the most important information on a web page first. Screenreaders users are no different in this respect. Likewise, sighted keyboard navigators find multiple keypresses very tedious when trying to TAB to a critical link or form control.

One suggestion is to stack the buttons in the order that they are most likely to be used as an aid to quick navigation.

For example:

1. Submit
2. Back
3. Reset

This particular ordering is based upon the idea that the most important (commonly used) button would be the “Submit” button – hence it should be presented first. If “Submit” is not what the user is after, they only need to tab once or twice to find their preferred option.

Obviously, there are going to be exceptions to this “rule”. If you need a button mid form such as “Find address from postcode”, this should be inserted at the appropriate point.

However, there is a counter argument which suggests that users may wish to inform themselves of all choices available before they make what could an irreversible decision. On this basis, the ordering might go:

1. Back
2. Reset
3. Submit

The logic here is that buttons/actions are listed in order of increasing potential ‘impact’. Again, the assumption is that the “Submit” button will be the commonly used option but, in this scenario, the non-sighted user can select it having been made aware of all alternatives but without having to navigate back through the list again.

This should be used sparingly, though. If it is consistently implemented across multiple pages, you’ll be educating the user in every instance where they need to submit data – which could rapidly become tedious. Perhaps it should be reserved for the final page in a multi-page form?

Balanced against all of the above is the concept of common user behaviour or previous conventions. Wherever possible, best use of previous conventions should take precedence over other options and button ordering shouldn’t change radically from page to page.

Users should never have to think if this can be avoided.

This particular issue appears to be something of a grey area with more than one valid viewpoint up for discussion. I have to admit, up until recently, that I had never really taken notice of the button order on forms that I actually used myself.

Is there a strong, pre-existing, convention?

Personally, I’m going to do some ‘market research’ and possibly re-think the priorities in my form designs.

With thanks to Grant Broome, Steve Green and the GAWDS mailing list.