Customize the placeholder text of your questions to prevent confusion and set expectations about the format and length of answers. This can speed up answering a form and improve completion rates.
You can use placeholder text to prevent submission errors by clarifying expectations about formatting, for example, by showing examples of character case and structure. You can also provide contextual help for your respondents in long-form questions to decrease cognitive load or prevent writer’s block.
Placeholder text customization works on the question level, so you can customize the placeholder text of each supported question separately in your form.
The supported question types for placeholder text customization are the following:
- Short text
- Long text
- Number
- Website
- Dropdown
- Clarify with AI
- FAQ with AI
- Video and Audio (when Text is selected)
To customize the placeholder text of your questions:
- Open up an existing form or create a new one and click + Add content.
- Select a supported question type from the list.
- Write your question, and optionally, add a description.
- Toggle the Custom placeholder text switch and type your placeholder in the text field below the toggle. The text you’ve typed will instantly appear in the placeholder field of your question.
The Address and Contact Info question types don’t support customized placeholder text fields by default, however, you can easily move your questions asking for address or contact information into a Multi-Question Page to start customizing your placeholder text.
In the example below, we’ve added some Short text questions to a Multi-Question Page asking for people’s address, and we’ve customized the placeholder text to give them guidance on what a properly formatted UK address should look like.
If you’re using the placeholder text field to provide information about the correct answer format, you can also toggle the Answer validation switch to add validation criteria with regular expressions (regex).
In the example below, we’ve added a validation pattern that will only allow people to enter 6-12 characters, uppercase letters, and numbers in the text field. We’ve also added an example of what a correctly formatted coupon code would look like in the placeholder text field.
Note that in the published form, the placeholder text will disappear as soon as your respondent starts typing their answer in the text field…
…so make sure you don’t add your question, description, or any other information that needs to be visible while completing the form as your placeholder text.
Accessibility reminder: placeholder text can’t meet color-contrast requirements, so make sure to never place key information in a placeholder text field.
The custom placeholder text you’ve added to your questions will be translated with the rest of the form if you have the Translations feature enabled. Translations for placeholder text will be generated automatically, and you’ll be able to edit translations manually, just like the rest of your form content.