Caroline Jarrett
Forms and survey specialist
Entering data into fields is a chore and not a fun activity. Thus, you should anticipate frequently selected items and make data entry easier for the user by providing fields with pre-populated smart default values — you can compute them based on other info (e.g. state based on zip code) — or prompts based on previously entered data.
Designing Perfect Text Field: Clarity, Accessibility and User Effort
Nick Babich
1K38
This is an excellent point.
It’s crucial to be very sensitive to whether your proposed default value might be alienating to some people in your user group.
For example: it can be annoying for women to discover that a question about gender defaults to ‘male’ — even if men are more frequent users of your app or form.
(And of course, the same problem can happen the other way around).
