UIEtips Article: Web Form Design in the Wild
October 2nd, 2007
In this week’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, we published a fantastic article written by Luke Wroblewski, a Principal Designer at Yahoo!, where he discusses tips for improving web forms and impacting user success.
Read Luke Wroblewski’s article on Web Forms.
If you would like to learn more about design web app forms, you can catch Luke Wroblewski at this year’s UI12 Conference in Cambridge, MA, November 5-8. Luke will present the short talk, Best Practices for Form Design and the full-day seminar, Site Seeing: Communicating Successfully with Visual Design.
Do you have any best practices for designing forms? What usability problems have you encountered with your web forms? I’d love to hear about your experiences. Share your thoughts below.
October 2nd, 2007 at 8:23 pm
For short forms, I like to put the “this is what I started filling out this form in the first place for” input box first. For example, on a weblog, I want the big comment textarea at the top, the name field second and the e-mail third. If a reader has a reaction and wants to share it, I don’t want to get in their way with administrivia.
Also, I like to think it helps out those of us with extremely short attention spans.
October 3rd, 2007 at 8:19 am
I’m struck by how many design errors seem to be peculiar to web forms, and are nearly unheard-of for a thick-client desktop app: A desktop app would use a classic message box which shows the error in context (5), gives the message top visual priority (6), and doesn’t erase earlier input (8). (Not that a message box is necessarily the best way to go for the web). A desktop app might have navigation to irrelevant windows (1), mismatch command and window name (2), and lack of defaults (3), but in practice these are very rare except in real amateur designs. Why is it necessary for web form designers to re-learn the lessons from the past?
October 4th, 2007 at 7:05 am
One of my most popular usability posts earlier this year was entitled Form Field Best Practice and Hints to Assure Wary Users.
Hopefully this will provide some greater insight into the potential pitfalls of poorly designed and delivered forms (especially when a new user is negotiating a checkout process, where the industry wide issue of abandonment often occurs).
October 8th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
I would recommend that those interested in forms design check out the website http://www.bfma.org. BFMA (previously known as the Business Forms Management Association) is the industry association made up of forms designers and managers. It has been around for almost 50 years! Obviously they started with their focus on paper forms, but are now very interested and involved in electronic forms, usability and related issues. They have a listserv called “Formspace” to which you can subscribe for questions, help, opinions, etc.
I think both the usability community and the forms community would profit from more interaction between the two.