[Sigia-l] "clear" button on web forms

[Listera]

Boniface Lau:

> Since the checkbox approach was suggested as a replacement for the
> "clear" button, let us consider a scenario.

You know what, let's not.

Nobody, certainly not I, ever suggested that individual field persistence is
a substitute for one-step form clearance. I'm not sure what else I can do
for you to see the difference in what they are designed to do.

You can indulge in straw-man arguments by yourself, but I've been using the
technique I described since the mid-90s for high-speed data entry
client/server and web apps that I developed. I cannot remember a single
complaint or a request to not have it.

This is an extremely useful method especially when, as a UI designer, you
don't know what fields a particular data-enterer might want to be persistent
(that's why it's optional and not hardwired) and when they might decide they
no longer need persistence [1].

It takes a single click and saves an enormous amount of repetitive keying
and it's completely user configurable. Since by default, all the boxes are
unchecked, there's absolutely no additional work that needs to be performed
by the user, until/unless they need it.

If you don't want to avail yourself to this method, please don't. If you
simply want to be disagreeable with me let me say, well, the sun rises every
every night.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba 

[1] In one company, for example, the records to be keyed in would come in
batches from different regions. For Midwest, certain fields would always
repeat, for Mid-Atlantic those never would. So when the data-enterer
detected a batch change, she would uncheck persistence appropriately. The
same company also had a 24 digit alphanumeric ID field. Some times the whole
number (except for the first 4) would be the same for a bunch of records, so
the data-enterer would check that field and enter only 4 digits instead of
the whole 24. And so on.