Comment by bphogan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bphogan | Hacker News Reader

I can't believe that 16 years after forms first appeard on the web we're still having this discussion.

Using "submit" as your label? So are thousands of other sites. Your users won't be confused.

Using something more descriptive? That's fine too. Maybe it looks a little nicer and less generic. But it's not a usability problem.

Don't worry about this for a second. Instead focus on the real problems, like creating usable and accessible form fields with associated labels. Write easy to follow directions that explain which fields are required and what format you're expecting (or write better error handling techniques to accept a variety of inputs.) Write and make visible appropriate error messages to help your users through the process so they don't make mistakes. Record the mistakes they make so you can use that data to engineer your forms in ways that reduce user errors.

There are so many other things worth your attention.

I totally agree. Using buttons with concise messages is best when they're used to access some functionality, but when submitting data the users have been clicking on submit buttons for more than a decade to do so. I'd even go on and say that in a lot of cases when you're submitting data, it's correct to use either simple actions as 'save', 'send', and 'submit' instead of 'Do the chicken dance when you click on this button'

Instead of worrying about submit buttons, which by the way generally exist a lone entities at the end of a form (which makes it's use even more obvious), worry about the actual usability of your forms and the logic behind the error handling.

tl;dr => In more cases than not it's more correct to use 'submit' as button copy than a more verbose counterpart when submitting forms.

  > when submitting data the users have been
  > clicking on submit buttons for more than
  > a decade to do so

So you only want users on your site that have at least a decade of experience with the internet?

I don't understand why this got down voted. You can't assume that users will have experience with the internet. I work with a lot of people have little experience with technology and the internet and whose second language is English and they don't understand when they see "submit."

I disagree, and to speak so broadly as to say it's not a usability problem regardless of context or audience is irresponsible at best.

You designed an interaction that requires the user to press a button. Take an additional 30 seconds to describe on its label what the effect of pressing that button is.

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