What

Help users to answer questions on the form by providing good default values.

Example image

Booking a flight using Openjet.co.uk is easy. ‘Flights’ is preselected option, ‘from’ field is prefilled with ‘London’ (Openjet is a British site), ‘Return’ is selected from the dropdown since most of the people buy round trips, and it even makes a guess on the dates I’d like to travel. Also, the number of travelers is defaulted to 1 adult, and it searches from all airlines by default.

Use when

• A good guess of the most common answer can be made.
  • Most users won’t change the answer.
• Making a guess doesn’t annoy the user.
  • Don’t suggest gender, password, or make default the option to receive newsletters etc. from the site.
• The form field is required.
• Can be used with almost all form controls, but default selections are important especially with a set of radio buttons.
  • The user gets an error if he doesn’t make a selection.