Hi folks,
A lot of you have been asking for more control over answer placeholders, and we’re excited to share that it’s now available in Typeform. You can now set a custom answer placeholder for each individual question, in much the same way that you would edit the question title and description.
This is one of our most-requested improvements, and it makes it much easier to guide respondents with clearer, more contextual prompts right where they’re needed.
What this unlocks
- Add more specific guidance for each question, instead of relying on the default placeholder text.
- Show examples of the format or type of answer you want people to enter, which can help reduce confusion and prevent submission errors.
- Give respondents a little extra context on open-ended questions to make answering feel easier and faster.
- Make Address fields more contextually relevant based on your location
Here's a short video explainer:
Where it works
Custom placeholder text is supported on these question types:
- Short text
- Long text
- Number
- Website
- Dropdown
- Clarify with AI
- FAQ with AI
- Video and Audio when Text is selected
A couple of helpful notes
If you want custom placeholders for Address or Contact Info flows, you can rebuild them as a Multi-Question Page using supported question types to get the same result.
If you use Multi-Language forms, placeholder text is supported there too: translations are generated automatically and can also be edited manually.
One small accessibility reminder: placeholder text shouldn’t contain key information that respondents need to keep visible while answering, because it disappears once they start typing and it can’t meet color-contrast requirements.
You can check out the full Help Center guide here: Customize the placeholder text of your questions.
Let us know in the comments how you plan to use it, we’d love to see what you build!