This is from a client's office. No problem to see when to push and when to pull. Nice. Simple.

Yesterday I asked a question on Twitter about radio buttons: "Is it ok to not offer a default value for a radio button group, to force the user to make a choice?"

The most popular answer seemed to be "it depends" (as always), though noone really seemed to liked the idea.

I know Nielsen says you should always offer a default value, but in this case we really wanted the user to make an active choice between two alternatives. Not making a choice was not an option.

My personal view on this is that not having a default value somehow makes me feel itchy, but I can't really argue for it more than that it's standard according to W3C. However, what we're designing is not a web based system.

Anyway, I decided to follow @danielCK's tip to have two action buttons instead, one for each alternative, to simply avoid the problem. I'd like to know though - what's your view on this? Is it always completely wrong to leave the radiobutton group without a default value?