101 UX Principles

Chapter #38. Don't Ever Clear User-Entered Data Unless Specifically Asked To

Your long-suffering user has painstakingly entered field after field of data into your form, often on a tiny mobile screen with an on screen keyboard. Don't clear this data unless the user specifically abandons the flow (maybe by hitting cancel). If clicking something is going to reload the page, and this might potentially fail, then make sure you save the user-entered data first.

This is an interesting example of where technical reality meets UX. On the one hand, if a browser could speak, it would likely argue that reloading a form should clear it, as we're literally telling the browser to fetch the empty form again. However, we're not robots, we're humans, and so much ...