Wouldn't it depend entirely on which is more common in your form? If it's a medical form and 95% of the fields are required, mark the optional ones. If it's a social network sign-up page and most of the fields are optional, mark the required ones. I don't know what kind of slope-browed sadist wouldn't mark anything at all.

Another UI/UX "expert" who needs to reinvent the wheel to justify his existence.

Of course it should. Who hasn't had the experience of an unhelpful message telling us that all required fields be completed, but without indicating just which those are supposed to be. The question is horseshit.

Here's a wild thought: only put required fields on your form.

Designing UIs has been part of my job for a while now, and it's always about the bigger picture. Where is this "optional" information being used? If it's optional, does this introduce complexity down the line (handling / not handling it depending on whether it was provided)?

You can always break down and simplify things. Perhaps this optional information is irrelevant -- exclude it altogether. Is it relevant in some contexts only? Handle it separately for these contexts only.

Marking "required" fields is lazy design imo.

>However, there is another famous UI book written in Russian. The author of this book is against marking fields as required due to the following reasons.

But which book is this?

Web Incubator Community Group forum topic: Browsers should clearly mark required fields

https://discourse.wicg.io/t/browsers-should-clearly-mark-req...

Of course they should be. The only question is how.

> Another interesting approach. The author shows an example where you have a site URL input and the label says "Your site, if you have one". Or, the label is "Site" and there is a hint below it: "if you have one".

> On the one hand, it feels more natural to me. It's like asking people in real life "Hey, may I have caramel syrup if you have one?".

Strange that a UI designer might consider more natural language in a form to be better, as it seems antithetical to "Don't make me think".

Better title: “Should required fields be marked with asterisks, or something else?”

If you're interested in usability topics, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ is a much better source.

Absolutely. Even if only for the timesaving.

A simple and clear approach is adding "(required)", or the localised equivalent, to the required fields.

> Asterisks are an invention of WEB. Operating systems usually don't use them at all.

Asterisks aren't an invention of the web, they're a hold over from paper forms. It is/was common to have an asterisk beside required fields. Because that was already a convention it was adopted by designers & ported over to digital.

> You can separate required and non required fields

I think this is good when its appropriate to the data. It's almost like you'd apply it at a fieldset level rather than field level. As in, asking for username/email/password and then in another section asking for what your interests are for the algo recommendations is great.

If you have something like fields for name — first name/last name are both mandatory; middle name is optional — it would really break the flow of the form if they weren't in conventional order.

> Asterisks are an invention of WEB. Operating systems usually don't use them at all.

What kind of horseshit is this? With a 5" wikipedia search:

> In the Middle Ages, the asterisk was used to emphasize a particular part of text, often linking those parts of the text to a marginal comment.

That's practically identical to the use of asterisks on the web: pointing to a side note that says that these fields are mandatory.

Also, the examples used to demo the asterisk counter-proposals are cherry-picked to be super simple. The minute your form becomes more complicated than "email/password/phone", the counter-proposals become inferior to simply using an asterisk.

PS. Who the hell spells web as "WEB" in 2022? In fact when "WEB" was ever considered proper, outside of all-caps headings?