[IxDA Discuss] Marking required fields on desktop UIs?

[Tubman, Wahne]

We addressed this issue recently as well. What we did was to group
required fields using the group box control and placed them at the top
of the form. We followed the required group with a set of non-required
fields also displayed within a group box. We labeled each group box
accordingly- Required Fields, Optional Fields.
Validation happens on submit. If any of the required fields are without
values we display an asterisk next to the offending field.


-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com
[mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com] On Behalf Of
Alan Wexelblat
Sent: Monday, October 30, 2006 6:15 PM
To: discuss-interactiondesigners.com at lists.interactiondesigners.com
Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Marking required fields on desktop UIs?

[Please voluntarily trim replies to include only relevant quoted
material.]

Greetings

I am having trouble determining if there is a standard or best
practice for marking which fields are required on a desktop
application form.  This is a fairly standard Windows UI with lots of
dialogs.  Each dialog has some mandatory and some optional fields, and
which are which tends to change with the data, system parameters, etc.

Therefore, I want to have some visual treatment so users can know at a
glance what fields are mandatory.  On the Web there is a convention to
mark required fields with asterisks (*) but this convention does not
seem to have been back-ported to desktop UIs.

Anyone have any pointers or suggestions?

-- 
--Alan Wexelblat
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