Be Tab-Smart

Override a form’s tab order so that users get to the entry boxes they need.

Setting the tab order is probably not the biggest thing on your mind when you design a form. It doesn’t really require much planning or analysis.

Typically, you do it at the end, after all the controls are in place. To be honest, at times I’ve simply forgotten to set a tab order on my forms. But, of course, the user community lets me know when that happens.

So, I started thinking that if tab stops on a form are really important to users, why not go one step better and make the tab order work more intelligently. On some forms only some boxes receive entries. A smart way to tab through a form in this situation is to sense which entry boxes can be skipped.