Tags: auto

Forms on the web are an opportunity to make big improvements to the user experience with very little effort. The effort can be as little as sprinkling in a smattering of humble HTML attributes. But the result can be a turbo-charged experience for the user, allowing them to sail through their task.

This is particularly true on mobile devices where people have to fill in forms using a virtual keyboard. Any improvement you can make to their flow is worth investigating. But don’t worry: you don’t need to add a complex JavaScript library or write convoluted code. Well-written HTML will get you very far.

If you’re using the right input type value, you’re most of the way there. Browsers on mobile devices can use this value to infer which version of the virtual keyboard is best. So think beyond the plain text value, and use search, email, url, tel, or number when they’re appropriate.

But you can offer more hints to those browsers. Here are three attributes you can add to input elements. All three are enumerated values, which means they have a constrained vocabulary. You don’t need to have these vocabularies memorised. You can look them when you need to.

inputmode

The inputmode attribute is the most direct hint you can give about the virtual keyboard you want. Some of the values are redundant if you’re already using an input type of search, email, tel, or url.

But there might be occasions where you want a keyboard optimised for numbers but the input should also accept other characters. In that case you can use an input type of text with an inputmode value of numeric. This also means you don’t get the spinner controls on desktop browsers that you’d normally get with an input type of number. It can be quite useful to supress the spinner controls for numbers that aren’t meant to be incremented.

If you combine inputmode="numeric" with pattern="[0-9]", you’ll get a numeric keypad with no other characters.

The list of possible values for inputmode is text, numeric, decimal, search, email, tel, and url.

enterkeyhint

Whereas the inputmode attribute provides a hint about which virtual keyboard to show, the enterkeyhint attribute provides an additional hint about one specific key on that virtual keyboard: the enter key.

For search forms, you’ve got an enterkeyhint option of search, and for contact forms, you’ve got send.

The enterkeyhint only changes the labelling of the enter key. On some browsers that label is text. On others it’s an icon. But the attribute by itself doesn’t change the functionality. Even though there are enterkeyhint values of previous and next, by default the enter key will still submit the form. So those two values are less useful on long forms where the user is going from field to field, and more suitable for a series of short forms.

The list of possible values is enter, done, next, previous, go, search, and send.

autocomplete

The autocomplete attribute doesn’t have anything to do with the virtual keyboard. Instead it provides a hint to the browser about values that could pre-filled from the user’s browser profile.

Most browsers try to guess when they can they do this, but they don’t always get it right, which can be annoying. If you explicitly provide an autocomplete hint, browsers can confidently prefill the appropriate value.

Just think about how much time this can save your users!

There’s a name value you can use to get full names pre-filled. But if you have form fields for different parts of names—which I wouldn’t recommend—you’ve also got:

• given-name,
• additional-name,
• family-name,
• nickname,
• honorific-prefix, and
• honorific-suffix.

You might be tempted to use the nickname field for usernames, but no need; there’s a separate username value.

As with names, there’s a single tel value for telephone numbers, but also an array of sub-values if you’ve split telephone numbers up into separate fields:

• tel-country-code,
• tel-national,
• tel-area-code,
• tel-local, and
• tel-extension.

There’s a whole host of address-related values too:

• street-address,
• address-line1,
• address-line2, and
• address-line3, but also
• address-level1,
• address-level2,
• address-level3, and
• address-level4.

If you have an international audience, addresses can get very messy if you’re trying to split them into separate parts like this.

There’s also postal-code (that’s a ZIP code for Americans), but again, if you have an international audience, please don’t make this a required field. Not every country has postal codes.

Speaking of countries, you’ve got a country-name value, but also a country value for the country’s ISO code.

Remember, the autocomplete value is specifically for the details of the current user. If someone is filling in their own address, use autocomplete. But if someone has specified that, say, a billing address and a shipping address are different, that shipping address might not be the address associated with that person.

On the subject of billing, if your form accepts credit card details, definitely use autocomplete. The values you’ll probably need are:

• cc-name for the cardholder,
• cc-number for the credit card number itself,
• cc-exp for the expiry date, and
• cc-csc for the security again.

Again, some of these values can be broken down further if you need them: cc-exp-month and cc-exp-year for the month and year of the expiry date, for example.

The autocomplete attribute is really handy for log-in forms. Definitely use the values of email or username as appropriate.

If you’re using two-factor authentication, be sure to add an autocomplete value of one-time-code to your form field. That way, the browser can offer to prefill a value from a text message. That saves the user a lot of fiddly copying and pasting. Phil Nash has more details on the Twilio blog.

Not every mobile browser offers this functionality, but that’s okay. This is classic progressive enhancement. Adding an autocomplete value won’t do any harm to a browser that doesn’t yet understand the value.

Use an autocomplete value of current-password for password fields in log-in forms. This is especially useful for password managers.

But if a user has logged in and is editing their profile to change their password, use a value of new-password. This will prevent the browser from pre-filling that field with the existing password.

That goes for sign-up forms too: use new-password. With this hint, password managers can offer to automatically generate a secure password.

There you have it. Three little HTML attributes that can help users interact with your forms. All you have to do was type a few more characters in your input elements, and users automatically get a better experience.

This is a classic example of letting the browser do the hard work for you. As Andy puts it, be the browser’s mentor, not its micromanager:

Give the browser some solid rules and hints, then let it make the right decisions for the people that visit it, based on their device, connection quality and capabilities.

I’m a big fan of HTML5’s datalist element and its elegant design. It’s a way to progressively enhance any input element into a combobox.

You use the list attribute on the input element to point to the ID of the associated datalist element.

<label for="homeworld">Your home planet</label>
<input type="text" name="homeworld" id="homeworld" list="planets">
<datalist id="planets">
 <option value="Mercury">
 <option value="Venus">
 <option value="Earth">
 <option value="Mars">
 <option value="Jupiter">
 <option value="Saturn">
 <option value="Uranus">
 <option value="Neptune">
</datalist>

It even works on input type="color", which is pretty cool!

The most common use case is as an autocomplete widget. That’s how I’m using it over on The Session, where the datalist is updated via Ajax every time the input is updated.

But let’s stick with a simple example, like the list of planets above. Suppose the user types “jup” …the datalist will show “Jupiter” as an option. The user can click on that option to automatically complete their input.

It would be handy if you could automatically submit the form when the user chooses a datalist option like this.

Well, tough luck.

The datalist element emits no events. There’s no way of telling if it has been clicked. This is something I’ve been trying to find a workaround for.

I got my hopes up when I read Amber’s excellent article about document.activeElement. But no, the focus stays on the input when the user clicks on an option in a datalist.

So if I can’t detect whether a datalist has been used, this best I can do is try to infer it. I know it’s not exactly the same thing, and it won’t be as reliable as true detection, but here’s my logic:

• Keep track of the character count in the input element.
• Every time the input is updated in any way, check the current character count against the last character count.
• If the difference is greater than one, something interesting happened! Maybe the user pasted a value in …or maybe they used the datalist.
• Loop through each of the options in the datalist.
• If there’s an exact match with the current value of the input element, chances are the user chose that option from the datalist.
• So submit the form!

Here’s how that translates into DOM scripting code:

document.querySelectorAll('input[list]').forEach( function (formfield) {
  var datalist = document.getElementById(formfield.getAttribute('list'));
  var lastlength = formfield.value.length;
  var checkInputValue = function (inputValue) {
    if (inputValue.length - lastlength > 1) {
      datalist.querySelectorAll('option').forEach( function (item) {
        if (item.value === inputValue) {
          formfield.form.submit();
        }
      });
    }
    lastlength = inputValue.length;
  };
  formfield.addEventListener('input', function () {
    checkInputValue(this.value);
  }, false);
});

I’ve made a gist with some added feature detection and mustard-cutting at the start. You should be able to drop it into just about any page that’s using datalist. It works even if the options in the datalist are dynamically updated, like the example on The Session.

It’s not foolproof. The inference relies on the difference between what was previously typed and what’s autocompleted to be more than one character. So in the planets example, if someone has type “Jupite” and then they choose “Jupiter” from the datalist, the form won’t automatically submit.

But still, I reckon it covers most common use cases. And like the datalist element itself, you can consider this functionality a progressive enhancement.

When I started writing a post about architects, gardeners, and design systems, it was going to be a quick follow-up to my post about web standards, dictionaries, and design systems. I had spotted an interesting metaphor in one of Frank’s posts, and I thought it was worth jotting it down.

But after making that connection, I kept writing. I wanted to point out the fetishism we have for creation over curation; building over maintenance.

Then the post took a bit of a dark turn. I wrote about how the most commonly cited reasons for creating a design system—efficiency and consistency—are the same processes that have led to automation and dehumanisation in the past.

That’s where I left things. Others have picked up the baton.

Dave wrote a post called The Web is Industrialized and I helped industrialize it. What I said resonated with him:

This kills me, but it’s true. We’ve industrialized design and are relegated to squeezing efficiencies out of it through our design systems. All CSS changes must now have a business value and user story ticket attached to it. We operate more like Taylor and his stopwatch and Gantt and his charts, maximizing effort and impact rather than focusing on the human aspects of product development.

But he also points out the many benefits of systemetising:

At the same time, I have seen first hand how design systems can yield improvements in accessibility, performance, and shared knowledge across a willing team. I’ve seen them illuminate problems in design and code. I’ve seen them speed up design and development allowing teams to build, share, and validate prototypes or A/B tests before undergoing costly guesswork in production. There’s value in these tools, these processes.

Emphasis mine. I think that’s a key phrase: “a willing team.”

Ethan tackles this in his post The design systems we swim in:

A design system that optimizes for consistency relies on compliance: specifically, the people using the system have to comply with the system’s rules, in order to deliver on that promised consistency. And this is why that, as a way of doing something, a design system can be pretty dehumanizing.

But a design system need not be a constraining straitjacket—a means of enforcing consistency by keeping creators from colouring outside the lines. Used well, a design system can be a tool to give creators more freedom:

Does the system you work with allow you to control the process of your work, to make situational decisions? Or is it simply a set of rules you have to follow?

This is key. A design system is the product of an organisation’s culture. That’s something that Brad digs into his post, Design Systems, Agile, and Industrialization:

I definitely share Jeremy’s concern, but also think it’s important to stress that this isn’t an intrinsic issue with design systems, but rather the organizational culture that exists or gets built up around the design system. There’s a big difference between having smart, reusable patterns at your disposal and creating a dictatorial culture designed to enforce conformity and swat down anyone coloring outside the lines.

Brad makes a very apt comparison with Agile:

Not Agile the idea, but the actual Agile reality so many have to suffer through.

Agile can be a liberating empowering process, when done well. But all too often it’s a quagmire of requirements, burn rates, and story points. We need to make sure that design systems don’t suffer the same fate.

Jeremy’s thoughts on industrialization definitely struck a nerve. Sure, design systems have the ability to dehumanize and that’s something to actively watch out for. But I’d also say to pay close attention to the processes and organizational culture we take part in and contribute to.

Matthew Ström weighed in with a beautifully-written piece called Breaking looms. He provides historical context to the question of automation by relaying the story of the Luddite uprising. Automation may indeed be inevitable, according to his post, but he also provides advice on how to approach design systems today:

We can create ethical systems based in detailed user research. We can insist on environmental impact statements, diversity and inclusion initiatives, and human rights reports. We can write design principles, document dark patterns, and educate our colleagues about accessibility.

Finally, the ouroboros was complete when Frank wrote down his thoughts in a post called Who cares?. For him, the issue of maintenance and care is crucial:

Care applies to the built environment, and especially to digital technology, as social media becomes the weather and the tools we create determine the expectations of work to be done and the economic value of the people who use those tools. A well-made design system created for the right reasons is reparative. One created for the wrong reasons becomes a weapon for displacement. Tools are always beholden to values. This is well-trodden territory.

Well-trodden territory indeed. Back in 2015, Travis Gertz wrote about Design Machines:

Designing better systems and treating our content with respect are two wonderful ideals to strive for, but they can’t happen without institutional change. If we want to design with more expression and variation, we need to change how we work together, build design teams, and forge our tools.

Also on the topic of automation, in 2018 Cameron wrote about Design systems and technological disruption:

Design systems are certainly a new way of thinking about product development, and introduce a different set of tools to the design process, but design systems are not going to lessen the need for designers. They will instead increase the number of products that can be created, and hence increase the demand for designers.

And in 2019, Kaelig wrote:

In order to be fulfilled at work, Marx wrote that workers need “to see themselves in the objects they have created”.

When “improving productivity”, design systems tooling must be mindful of not turning their users’ craft into commodities, alienating them, like cogs in a machine.

All of this is reminding me of Kranzberg’s first law:

Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.

I worry that sometimes the messaging around design systems paints them as an inherently positive thing. But design systems won’t fix your problems:

Just stay away from folks who try to convince you that having a design system alone will solve something.

It won’t.

It’s just the beginning.

At the same time, a design system need not be the gateway drug to some kind of post-singularity future where our jobs have been automated away.

As always, it depends.

Remember what Frank said:

A well-made design system created for the right reasons is reparative. One created for the wrong reasons becomes a weapon for displacement.

The reasons for creating a design system matter. Those reasons will probably reflect the values of the company creating the system. At the level of reasons and values, we’ve gone beyond the bounds of the hyperobject of design systems. We’re dealing in the area of design ops—the whys of systemising design.

This is why I’m so wary of selling the benefits of design systems in terms of consistency and efficiency. Those are obviously tempting money-saving benefits, but followed to their conclusion, they lead down the dark path of enforced compliance and eventually, automation.

But if the reason you create a design system is to empower people to be more creative, then say that loud and proud! I know that creativity, autonomy and empowerment is a tougher package to sell than consistency and efficiency, but I think it’s a battle worth fighting.

Design systems are neither good nor bad (nor are they neutral).

Addendum: I’d just like to say how invigorating it’s been to read the responses from Dave, Ethan, Brad, Matthew, and Frank …all of them writing on their own websites. Rumours of the demise of blogging may have been greatly exaggerated.