Is the reset button really required?

Question

On a web contact form, is the reset button really required? Is it really used by anyone? If I don't put it in a page, is there an usability fail?

10x!

Answer 1

I honestly don't think so in the general case, but you should talk to your users or otherwise examine how they use your system to make sure.

General rule of thumb: If you aren't sure that it's a requirement and you have no way of knowing, don't include it. You can always include it on a later iteration.

Answer 2

Not only on the contact form. I can't also find the benefit of reset button in any type of HTML form, IMHO. But I tend to put it every time I create a form :)

Answer 3

Well, it's very useful to erase that textarea your customer just took the time to write, because they press the wrong button -before they lose it anyway because the session expires, and have to retype-

No, I really don't think it's useful.

Answer 4

I don't think it's necessary in most web-pages. If you're entering information, and you enter it wrong, then you'll need to go through every wrong text-box and re-enter it. The reset button is, at minimum, one extra button click on top of that.

If you don't want to enter information, you just don't click the submit button.

The only time I see a reset button being useful is if you have a multi-page workflow, and need to be able to start from scratch. Even then I would suggest re-designing the workflow.

Answer 5

The reset button must be the safe winner in any contest measuring a uses/usefulness ratio since it's omnipresent and fully useless.

Answer 6

Maybe it's the web's own Boss key?

Answer 7

I think it's a) completely useless to 99% of users; and b) requires far too much work in a typical LOB application. Often business analysts add requirements for the Reset button without giving any thought as to why this feature is required.

Answer 8

Only reason I could think of is on a preview & confirm scenario, where a user might modify part of their entry before hitting the big bad send button, and actually decide itt made more sense the first time around

Answer 9

I usually leave out the reset button, because I've never seen anybody use it.

I often use the free space for a cancel button which returns the user to where he came from in the first place (the page linking to the form). Makes much more sense to me.

Answer 10

add it to the webform and log it whenever a user clicks it. that will provide information for your specific page if it's needed or not. we cannot guess if people want it or not. just use simple analyzing tools of users need it or not.

Answer 11

I guess it depends on how large the form is and how big the chance that you actually want to do this. TBH, i've been developing websites for years and never really added one to forms.

Answer 12

It's actually sometimes useful for web forms which will be accessed from public terminals - a good example would be a search form for a public library card catalogue.

Imagine if the search form has a lot of fields (author, year, keywords, topic, publisher, collection, title, series, whatever). This lets you do very specific searches (all books by authors named John published in 1987), but once you've found the result you (or another user) may want to do a new search using a very different set of terms (all books about fish published by Random House. A reset button can help a lot here, because you may otherwise find yourself manually clearing a large number of fields.

(Depending on implementation details, a reset button may also be useful if a user doesn't want the next user to see what they were searching for. Again, this is useful in the context of a library, where privacy is a concern.)

Answer 13

It is useful on a form that repeats your previous information. I have had cases in admin interfaces where the users want what they typed in last time, so they don't have to remember. However, on those occasions when they want the form to reset, they simply press the "clear" (or reset) button.

On a one-time form a reset button would be silly.

Answer 14

In my opinion the reset button is completely useless on the majority of forms. I mean think about it... Can you ever imagine a time were you would want to complete remove all of the information you typed in? Not likely. Most users tend to make edits to specific fields not the entire form.

In the case that you have to have such a secondary action like a reset button it's better that that button is a little smaller as well as colored a little differently. Let the user know "this button is different" and apply Fitt's Law to make it a little harder to click on.

Answer 15

A reset button should be used only when there is default information. An example is this form. What if I make changes to most of the values but then would like to get it back to it's original state? I guess I could reload the page as long as it doesn't resend my POST. Or I could just hit a simple reset button. The button was never intended to clear all information entered by the user but to reset preset data.

Answer 16

Absolutely NOT required. In fact, it's a bad idea to use it if you have a long form and have a RESET button at the bottom because you could make some people really angry if they find out that they accidently hit "RESET" and their data is deleted.

Answer 17

Required. Make sure you swap the position of the reset and submit buttons on some of your forms. Better yet, write code to randomly swap their position once in a blue moon.

In all seriousness, I've never used one. When I removed it from the forms on my school's registrar's site that I was working on when I was a student, nobody said anything. So I say leave it off.

Answer 18

I would suggest the usability fail will present itself if and when a user or business owner complains about the absence.

Definitely not required as a "standard" feature and usually a very bad idea with the exception of the special cases given above where the functionality seems to add value. However the most of the cases offered as examples above could be dealt with in different (and I would suggest, better) ways than with the, often awful, reset button.

Answer 19

What if I says it IS useful? But not in every form.

I use it with the "UPDATE" part in a CRUD application sometimes.

Say SO for example, I hit an edit link on a question.... and made some edits and reread it... but then I decided it is not a good edit... I have to reload the page or go back to the last page and hit the edit link again to get the original text.

Whereas, if there is a reset button slapped there, it'd be easy.

And there is always CTRL+Z.. so why not?

There are some good uses but just don't slap it in silly like what most ancient HTML books would teach you to.

Answer 20

It can be useful for clearing radio buttons without using Javascript.

In the form below either zero or one radio button may be selected:

        Select any one option for any Item(s):     
        Option 'A'    Option 'B'    Option 'C'
Item 1     o              o            o 
Item 2     o              o            o     
Item 3     o              o            o 
Item 4     o              o            o

If a user changes his mind or accidentally clicks on an item's button he didn't want, a reset button will clear the whole form, which seems to be only way to get rid of the selection without using Javascript.

Answer 21

Reset is for use with HTTP status 204 only

Destination of the form can send 204 No Content response, which causes browsers to leave the current page unchanged.

In that situation reset button is most reliable way to reset form to original state (page reload could re-send the form).

However I can't come up with realistic use-case for it anyway.