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Maybe it’s time to let the floating labels die

Daniel Berryhill
UX Collective
Published in
11 min readFeb 26, 2024
A man playing an acoustic guitar while singing into a microphone.
Photo by Riley Bartel on Unsplash

Floating labels offer no significant value to the user, inject needless confusion, and are ultimately pointless.

Introduction

The floating label pattern was a clever way to address the lack of visual space available for mobile devices, but it bled over into desktop web pages, where it never needed to be.

In a previous article, I explained why developers should stop using placeholders altogether. Some have argued in the comments of that article (as well as others) that the floating label addresses those concerns — namely, the issue of placeholders disappearing when the user is typing in the control.

Unfortunately, it still doesn’t address several of the other problems, and it introduces a few, as well.

Let’s go over what the floating label pattern is, how it came about, and why it needs to ride off into the sunset, never to return.

Background

What is the floating label pattern?

The floating label pattern is generally a text box that styles its label similar to a placeholder. Upon focus (or the user starts typing — depending on the implementation), the label:

  • Moves above where the user’s entry goes

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Published in UX Collective

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Responses (6)

What are your thoughts?

To be honest that seems to me (a non-designer) as a designer-made problem. Without a dissection of every element's purpose in the grand scheme I just see it as a place I interact with when I need to, for example, I put my email address. Upon…

Hey, Daniel. a we've had exchanges on a couple other posts where we somewhat disagree. However here we completely agree. In fact I hadn't thought about this nuance. I've just been going with the flow on this one. But from now-on, I'll use good ol'…

I have been using mobile devices since I got my iPhone 3DS and I have never seen this behavior in any apps I have used.