• Introduction

Autofill

Populating fields with previously known or stored values, pulled from actor profiles, prior sessions, browser data, or contextual defaults.

Part of the assisted task completion spectrum. Preemptive, silent, and only useful when confidence is high.

Data sources

Browser

Address, payment, and identity data that the actor manages through browser settings. The actor controls what gets stored; the browser matches fields by name attributes and autocomplete hints.

System

The application fills fields from its own knowledge of the actor: account details, preferences, prior entries. Less transparent than browser autofill because the actor may not realise what the system has on file.

  • Input — the primitive autofill populates

Resources & references

Related patterns

Precedes

  • Saving — what happens after pre-filled data is accepted

Enables

  • Data entry — autofill as a strategy for frictionless input

Enacts

  • Privacy — autofill surfaces what the system knows about the actor
  • Adaptability — autofill that learns from corrections over time

Complements

  • Autocomplete — the reactive counterpart: completes what the actor is actively typing rather than pre-populating from stored values
  • Assisted task completion — the spectrum this pattern belongs to
  • Suggestion — autofill as a form of implicit recommendation

Related

Preceded by

  • Good defaults — a good default is a guess made without the actor's stored data; where the system already holds the actual value, pre-filling from the record takes over from guessing

Hosted by

  • Form — form fields are the surface where autofill most commonly appears