← Back to context

Comment by MBCook

9 years ago

That's basically the only example I could think of: tracking if someone filled out a form field.

But in that case how can you tell the difference? I mean if they never clicked in the field or tabbed into it and submitted the form is that meaningfully different from they clicked into it and didn't type anything?

I can think of ways to work around it (keep a boolean for 'was filled out', a number that means 'they got up to field 17', etc.) but I'm still not sure you can draw a conclusion of 'they skipped it' vs 'they didn't enter anything'.

7 comments

MBCook

Reply
techiferous  9 years ago

You're assuming all the questions are being presented to the user at once. Imagine a UI that presents questions to a user one-by-one. If the user bails out of the survey early, the rest of the survey answers can be null.

  • MBCook  9 years ago

    In that case you can easily keep track of what step they got up to in the wizard. It's a different way to store the data, but would work just as well.

    I think the null vs empty argument works better when there are 40 boxes on screen at once. But again I'm not sure what semantic difference you'd find between 'they left it empty' and 'they never clicked into it'.