Everyday UI — Chrome Autofill

Molly Kim
Molly Kim
Sep 9, 2018 · 4 min read

While Autofill saves us from the burden of memorizing and spelling out long addresses and credit card numbers, it is not without its faults. Chrome’s Autofill tries to be overly helpful, sometimes rendering itself very unhelpful to the user. Take the following scenario into consideration: Over the summer, I was online shopping for rain boots at home, using my mother’s credit card (with her permission; she was treating me). I first filled out my name, phone number, and home address. Up until this point, Autofill served useful, allowing me to type only the first letter of my name, and filling out my entire cell number and street address. It also filled out my credit card information, but I just changed that to my mother’s card number. So far, so good.

However, things got less streamlined as I scrolled down to input my payment information. It occurred to me that while my ship-to and bill-to addresses were the equal, I had to uncheck the “shipping address is same as billing address” box (which is checked by default), seeing that that box essentially fills out my name and street address as I entered above. The street address itself was correct, because I wanted it shipped to my parents’ place, but not the name. I had to put my mother’s name for billing purposes, as it was her credit card.

Thus, I unchecked the box, and proceeded to fill out my mother’s information. I entered her name. I started typing in our address again, when Autofill suggested to complete it. I heartily agreed, but as soon as I pressed enter, it also changed the bill-to name to mine. Annoyed, I scrolled up a tad to manually revert the name by typing my mother’s name all out. Now, I realize that this is a niche case and that it wasn’t a huge deal because my mother’s name is fairly easy short. However, this feature requires users to fill out fields in a strategic way: if they want to use Autofill but change a few fields that are not in their Autofill settings, they must change those fields last. Otherwise, if they permit Chrome to automatically input even a single field after they fill out the rest of their forms, Chrome will Autofill all the fields to what it thinks is correct.

Before Autofill — About to Autofill — Overwritten name after Autofill :’(

Now, I acknowledge the usefulness of Autofill and understand that again, this is an edge case (how often do people shop online using other people’s credit cards?). I can’t find any official page explaining Chrome’s decision to make Autofill fill out (and overwrite) all known fields, but it’s not hard to imagine why. If I were indeed purchasing the rain boots out of my own bank account, Autofill would have saved me so much time. I would have just pressed the “m” key and clicked once on the “autofill” option. This would have been a lot more efficient than both the following two scenarios.

  1. I didn’t use Autofill and typed out my entire name, phone number, address, card number.
  2. Autofill only completed a single field at a time (i.e., I would type in the first digit/letter for each of the four fields).

Now, it would be helpful if Chrome gave its users an option to choose between its current fill-out-all Autofill and scenario 2 above. I believe it currently doesn’t because it would be lengthy to describe the difference between the two settings; I needed a few paragraphs to describe why scenario 2 may be more beneficial. A lot of Chrome users don’t really spend a lot of time setting up their default settings; having a long explanation would annoy users, just as how an overwhelming majority of people never read the Terms of Use for a lot of applications. Moreover, scenario 2 would be more efficient in far less situations than the status quo. Most of the time, people save a single name, phone number, address, and card number. I suppose Chrome weighed the benefits between offering this choice and keeping its default settings easier and quicker to set up, then went with the latter decided to not offer the option of choosing scenario 2 at all.

One solution to this dilemma would be to change the status quo into a third scenario:

3. Autofill only the fields that are currently empty.

In other words, no overwriting! Chrome could fill out only the fields that the user has not started filling out at the time when they click “Autofill.” This would allow the same efficiency in the majority of forms, but additionally, it would prevent users from having to go back and re-enter fields they wish to tweak.

Written by

Molly Kim

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade