Adding several items quickly

Posted by Wes Hooper on 5th December 2011 in Updates

When you're adding a to-do, ledger, company and so on, it's not unusual to need to add another one straight after.

Therefore, we've long had 'I need to add another' checkboxes at the end of these forms:

During a round of usability testing a few months back, one thing that came up is that all fields on a form tend to get scanned by your eyes and you have to make a decision about each one. Is it important? Can I skip it?

Therefore the checkbox was something you had to think about and actually got in the way, rather than being a time saving option.

We tried hiding the checkbox and moving it beside the Save button when your mouse got near the button:

That felt clumsy though and turns out we'd already solved the problem of 'secondary' actions on a form with a link to the right of the button - for example when cancelling an invoice:

So, we've reused that idea throughout Moobiz and added 'Save, then add another' links next to the Save button:

They don't feel like a part of the form you need to worry about as you scan through it and are one less click than the old checkboxes. Blue links stood out a little too much, but a subtle grey works just right.