James Wilding's Weblog

“Submit” is rarely good text for an HTML form’s submit button.

If you use “submit”, you’re probably committing the classic geek mistake of using technical language to describe something to non-technical people. Yes, from a technical perspective the button does ‘submit’ the form, but the people who are using it don’t care about how the form works: they care about what the form does.

“Submit” is a truism: I click; the form is submitted. Great — but then what? ”Add Link”, “Update Profile”, even the vague “Save Changes” are all better choices for button text because they explain what will actually happen when I click that button.

It’s called usability, folks.