September 5th, 2005
Apparently, not to be outdone by their competition, Hertz, Avis.com has chosen the rebellious route and decided to defy standard convention. They’ve decided that they would demonstrate how hard they try (after all, they do try harder) and change the way people fill out forms.
Convention has it that, in a form, a designer will designate mandatory fields with that old standby, the asterisk (*). Not that this is written in stone or anything.
As conventions go, it’s actually fairly recent. Nobody knows where it happened. But, somewhere, somebody decided that putting an asterisk next to an input field would indicate that the user would have to fill it with meaningful data (or at least some data), preventing them from moving to the next screen until they complied.
Avis’ designers found themselves faced with a different problem. Virtually every field on their forms is mandatory. Just a small handful are optional. Why clutter almost every field with that asterisk?
So, they did it. They dared to be different. And they decided, on their forms, the asterisk would denote an optional field, not a mandatory one like everyone else.
This is not a problem, if the users of Avis don’t use any other sites following the standard convention. But, being that it is the standard convention, what are the chances of that?
If those users do follow said convention, then their current knowledge may be that asterisks denote mandatory fields and they miss the bold text at the top of the form explaining otherwise. This could create several moments of confusion, much like a door that clearly is marked push even though it has a big bar that really wants to be pulled.
Maybe the designers at Avis should try a little less hard next time?