Why ‘title’ should not be a required field on online forms
It’s likely that most online forms that have ‘title’ as a required field were created that way without a second thought.
“Oh, the paper form had that, I just copied it.”
“We might need to send them a letter.”
“It’s more formal.”
However, knowing if a person goes by for example ‘Mx’, ‘Dr’ or ‘Prof’ does not help provide them a better service, in most cases.
Quite the opposite is true I would say. Being required to pick a label is a usability fail: an extra field for the user to complete, with no apparent gain.
Where title options are gender-binary or force women to show if they’re married, making ‘title’ a requirement can even alienate users or cause distress.
Countering the counter-arguments
I tried to think of reasons why services might need to know your title:
Reason 1: Authentication, when title is included in the authentication attribute
Reason 2: Email and letter house style that use titles in the greeting
Or want to know your title:
Reason 3. “Personalisation”
Reason 4. Data gathering
Some content and marketing professionals backed up some of these reasons on my related tweet.
But only reasons that actually benefit the user should count. None of these reasons really fulfils that:
For authentication, if you really drill down, it’s still not an intrinsic user need. It’s a societal created need for the user to provide identity verification that includes a title.
With house style, yes, ‘Hi Maggie’ is not always going to fit the tone of your communication, but does addressing the user with ‘Dear Mx Smith’, or ‘Dear Dame Smith’, lend a more formal tone, or help them more, than putting Dear Margaret Smith? Well, it may depend. As a user you might want a service provider to use your title due to professional pride or social status. I’ll dig deeper into that later on.
For various reasons, personalisation generally does not reflect a good return on investment and should not be used in support of doing something that positively affects user experience. OK, so say your algorithm has decided I’m female: but what if I’d actually prefer a “male” jumper to the ones your clothing company has commissioned to be designed for women? Plus, I might well have male relatives and friends, and of a variety of ages. Those people all have birthdays. I might also be looking for information on their behalf.
A field purely for data gathering is a catch 22. Under GDPR — similar privacy requirements will apply outside Europe — you should not collect any personal data that is not integral to providing the service. If collecting the data for data collection’s sake is your reason, it is not a valid reason.
Social status
I’d like to discount the social status reason as it does not, or at least should not, actually help the user. It just appeals to their vanity. That is not helping them in any way.
Should not is not does not, though. Perhaps there are times when contact from peerage titles gets sifted off for special attention? Possibly based on an assumption that they may for example be able to give a bigger donation to support a project or they may have connections that will help its PR. Possibly because there’s class bias among staff in some organisations. User benefit in these scenarios could be speed of reply or processing of query, request or service. I don’t agree that this is a good thing! More on that further on.
Professional pride
My instinct was to dismiss this too, but a couple of replies on my related twitter post spoke up for users being proud of their achievements and wanting recognition/expecting respect for them. From a usability perspective, this is not really a “user need” either. But it could fall under brand tone.
I have anecdotal, but fairly quantitative, evidence that women are less recognised as, for example, professors and doctors. By including Dr and Prof in correspondence to doctors and professors who are women, people working at your organisation will be more exposed to the fact that women hold those titles. This could influence their thinking and ripple out to what they pass on to others. This grass roots level is one way we can erase stereotypes.
So I would re-frame the “professional pride” reason as societal education and awareness.
The jury: reasons for and against
Interestingly, the only reasons that stand up as reasons are when we look at things from the individual user’s point of view or the benefit to society as whole.
In the specific case of asking for a user’s title, the possible social status service delivery benefit is actually a negative for society as a whole. If the culture for staff at an organisation says it is OK or unconsciously accepts/promotes rushing through service requests from gentry, that reinforces classism, prejudice and an unequal society.
(Which ultimately is good for no one, as society goes without the input of high intelligence, skilled humans if underprivileged backgrounds lead to them not using their intelligence and talents.)
It’s also possible that people working at an organisation may have unconscious bias against users with titles and process their applications more slowly!
Leaving the only valid reason for including titles as the promotion of women in high-education, high-skill roles. This benefits society, and could have a long term trickle effect benefit to the individual user.
Ethically valid reasons for and against
So, reasons for requiring titles are:
to spread awareness of capability of women to achieve high-education, high-skill positions
The reasons against requiring titles are:
usability
psychological comfort
promotion of equality
Conclusion
This is an opportunity for content design and service design to reach further than only digital limits and affect the format of for example printed letters. Not requiring titles will for some be a cross-organisation, cross-medium change.
I think that titles should not be required, as there is no immediate, direct user need to justify it. Caroline Jarrett, a form design expert, commented on my twitter thread about this with similar guidance. Personal, or organisational, style preference should not influence user centred design requirements:
“Don’t make ‘Title’ a required field. Always allow for no title, and for titles not in your restricted list. It’s better not to ask than to make it required.”
However, in the interests of promoting awareness of women in high intelligence and high skill roles, perhaps we should consider keeping an optional title field with options restricted to achievements, rather than social or martial status, for example: Dr, Prof?
Stephen Gill, content lead at GDS, suggested a free text field where users input their preference. Having that, as an optional field, could satisfy everyone. I’d suggest it comes after the name field in the form content hierarchy though, as it is not the most important element of the name section and so should not be the first thing users give cognitive effort to, even if the load is fairly light for example thinking “I can skip this”.
Sanjay Poyzer, senior service designer at Homes England, pointed out that users choosing how they’d like to be addressed is a want not a need.
To be 100% user needs based I’d go as far as to say remove title field altogether: it adds cognitive load even to skim past.
But as an active Twitter user who’s seen lots of women add Dr and Prof to their social account handles to challenge stereotypes, I feel like ethically there may be good cause to keep the optional title field. For now.
(Read the related tweet thread)
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