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Comment by mcgwiz | Hacker News Reader

Before we let the pendulum swing from one cargo cult to another, let's simply recognize that there are often more cues involved in conveying an interface's intention.

A login form will be accompanied by a Login button, for example. In this case, the intention of the two preceeding input fields should be obvious. (A well-designed site would permit any unique user key, including email and username.) Placeholders, in this case, are generally acceptable.

At the other extreme, a customer information form would have to rely more heavily on explicit, rather than inferred/implicit cues. This includes labels, and their heavyweight siblings, descriptive tool-tips and sidebars. Very complex forms may require extensive documentation.

Most problems have a whole spectrum of possible solutions, supported by a wide variety of tools. Don't let a single aggressive voice narrow your understanding of that.

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I'd accept placeholders as labels the day I see a reason to remove labels. And, no, fashion is not a reason.

Well your response implies the reason is stubbornness, and definitely not, as you say, fashion. The parent makes a great point and there are so many times when we're exposed to articles like this that promote a certain view as being the one true way. The original article makes some great points but so does your parent. If there's any wrong take on the labels vs. no labels debate its taking any one side at all. The right thing lies somewhere in the middle.

> Well your response implies the reason is stubbornness

I don't think so. I think he was trying to imply that there were objective reasons why labels are a good UI feature and that getting rid of them is unwise, even if it IS fashionable lately.

That is true of a lot of things in UI design. UI design is human enough that it IS affected by things such as fashions. But sometimes people forget that there are real, meaningful differences in usability, and often the "traditional" way of doing things is traditional for a good reason.

My own pet peeve in this regard? Menus. Microsoft office has made "ribbon" style interfaces quite popular instead of using menus. But menus had some important features: you could search through them exhaustively (at least the menus that aren't context-sensitive), and you can use the menus to incrementally learn the keyboard shortcuts for the features you use most often. Ribbons look nice, but they can't teach you to be faster.

So everybody is right, everything is relative, and so on?

Sorry but no. In some cases, maybe in most cases, the right thing in not in the middle. For example: having or not ads on Wikipedia, using or not useless animations in websites, allowing or not third-party to access private data, etc.

So, removing a useful cue for user without strong reasons to do so is not "somewhat right", it is just wrong. It is a sin, and will send you to designers' hell (which is a room with thousands of 30' screens on the walls displaying random websites from 5 years ago).

A well-designed site is not distinguished from an not-so-well-designed easily. There have been times where, during on of my haphazard working days, I come back to the (already focused) login form and forget whether the form asked for username or email (despite the fact that the form would have accepted both).

> A login form will be accompanied by a Login button

Forgive me for this tangent, but please please please follow the above advice. I've had it with login and search forms that replace their submit button with javascript.

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