Who is the recipient, in "recipient's email" on a contact us form?

I suppose if you want it to go to a specific person? Maybe? That’s all I got.

The company may have a general inbox for contact us messages. Putting a name in the recipient box would insure that your inquiry is handled by the right person. Just a guess.

I’ve seen that on “Share” forms – if you want to email an article to a friend, for example; I haven’t seen it on “Contact Us” forms. Is there a chance you clicked the wrong button accidentally, or maybe it’s a bad link? Try hitting the Back button and checking the link again. Otherwise, I’d be looking for an email listed on the site that I could copy and paste there.

My vote would be for the stupid web developer who put such an ambiguous input on a Contact Us form. Email them ordering them back to UI-001 (Bonehead User Interface).

Thank you all. Yes, it does make sense if the emailer has a particular recipient in mind. By the way I forgot to add, it is a “required” field.

When people are using the contact us form for the first time, they probably don’t know the name of anyone yet, let alone their email address.

@flo Rule 1 of form design is that if some users will have trouble knowing what to put in a given input, it should NOT be a required field.

That is it @ETpro. I was addressing those developers (you referred to in your last post) who might have done that or are planning to.