Should disabled options still be flagged as mandatory?
Building an application form for internal trained agents to help on-board new clients. Many pages of input, lots of info to add. 95% of fields are mandatory.
My design called for mandatory fields to be the default, with only optional fields being called out. Business did not like that, so now 95% of the field labels have a little red asterisk.
The application is very dynamic, so previous selections affect not only subsequent hide/show states but also mandatory/optional states.
Many buttons are Yes/No toggles. Often, a previous choice means the Yes/No decision is made for the user. So a toggle button might be auto-selected to Yes and disabled.
All that for a simple question:
If a toggle button has been auto-selected and auto- disabled, should it still have an asterisk to denote that it's mandatory?
I can go both ways.
To a typical (trained) user, "mandatory" could mean:
- this option must be actively chosen by me, therefore an asterisk on a disabled field is unexpected.
- this button must merely have an option selected (passive); it is not necessary to tell me something I don't need to know.
Opinions?