Hiding or showing a field at the right time has several advantages. It can decrease friction and increase web form rates by reducing the number of fields shown to a web user. Simultaneously, revealing fields based on other fields means you are only providing your sales and marketing team with relevant data.
Remember, only ask for the information you actually need from your web users.
Dropdowns (or picklists) are a great example of this. When you have two picklists that are related, we can use the option selected in the first to help narrow down the options in the second. In this example, we will use business sector to determine the options presented in industru.
To get started create two picklist fields, one for Business Sector and one for Industry. In the image below you can see that the options and labels for business sector have been added.
In the Industry field all of the possible options have been added, this means this list is very long and could create a frustrating user experience.
To make the process easier for the user we will add some field rules to Industry that will narrow the selection depending on the Business Sector selected previously.
Trigger:
Because the Business Sector field is visible to the user and its value can be changed in realtime you will need to set this rule to run continuously.
Conditions (IF):
The user selects Education in the Business Sector field
Actions (THEN)
Change this fields picklist options to; Higher Education, Library Education, Primary Education.
Repeat this step for each Business Sector value.
To make the Industry field appear when the user makes a selection in Business Sector, add a final rule that states:
Trigger:
Continuously
Conditions(IF):
The Business Sector field is not empty
Actions(THEN):
Show this field, otherwise hide this field
Push the changes live. Then create or select a form type which contains both Industry and Business Sector fields and a gate with this form type selected.
At first only the Business Sector field will display because of the final show/hide rule we added.
When Education is selected the Industry field will appear displaying the specific options we input in the rules.
Likewise for the other Business Sector options.
Important note: When using progressive form type behaviour ensure that both fields are displayed on the same step otherwise it can create a confusing customer experience when on the next session they only see reduced Industry options.