You’ll hear from top web app masters like Luke Wroblewski, Hagan Rivers, Bill Scott, Stephen Anderson, and Jared Spool. And you’ll get the details on Facebook, Twitter, 37signals, and Marriott Corporation’s design process.

How To Get the Free Recordings?

It’s easy. Just submit your email by March 14, 11:59 PM PT and you’ll get last year’s Web App Masters Tour talks and materials for free. No tricks, no quantity limits. We’ll send you an email with details on how to access this bundle of goodness.

Details on This Year’s Web App Masters Tour

After listening to last year’s talks, you’ll be itching join us this year in Philadelphia, Seattle, or Minneapolis.

More than half the conference focuses on mobile design, including Luke Wroblewski discussing mobile strategy, Josh Clark explaining the differences between mobile native apps and browser-based applications, and I’ll be looking at how mobile affects UX. And you’ll discover how emotionally connecting with your users and spending time with them can dramatically change how they use your applications. Plus you’ll hear case studies from Faceboook, PatientsLikeMe, SalesForce.com, AARP, and Netflix.

Get all the details on this year’s tour at UIETour.com. Use the promotion code RECORDINGS and pay just $795 when you register by March 24

Now hurry and get last year’s bundle of goodness before 11:59 pm on March 14.

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Knowing exactly how to design web forms is a struggle. Forms are often a critical step in a user’s journey. It’s easy to frustrate them if your forms aren’t well thought out or well crafted. Luckily, Luke Wroblewski is one of the world’s foremost experts on web form design.

Luke is also the author of the book, Web Form Design. Following up his UIE Virtual Seminar, Answered! Your Top Questions on Web Form Design, Luke addresses the most common questions about web forms.

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

“…For a very long time, every single Web form, when you got to the bottom, there was two check boxes. One was checked, one was unchecked, and there was a button that led you to submit. So the first one that was checked by default was, ‘I want to be subscribed to your newsletter. Please send me marketing materials.’

We call this the, ‘Spam check box,’ and that was always default checked. Then there was the second check box underneath it that was, ‘I agree to the terms of service and privacy policy,
which you actually had to check. So the first thing everybody had to do was uncheck the ones for the marketing purposes, check the one for the terms of service, and then click the button.

So it was really an awkward dance. Actually, many, many times, I’ve seen when I’ve looked at analytics on forms that the Terms of Service check box trips people up, and leads to an error
state. People miss it.

It’s usually small. It’s kind of obscure. It’s unclear whether or not you actually have to hit it.

(I’ve) written a book on Web form design, even when I go through some of these forms, I just miss it, and I forget to check it…”

Listen in to the podcast and hear Luke address these questions and more:

• Does field repetition, for confirmation of data, improve performance or not?
• Does having help links such as, “Why are we asking you this?” or “More Info”, within forms increase completion rates?
• What is your opinion on conditionally-required fields?
• Do you have any data on the “Mad Libs” approach to web forms?
• Does the size of the field box affect whether people complete the form or not?

How are you making your web forms more usable? Please share your questions or thoughts in our comments section.

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Luke Wroblewski

Luke Wroblewski is one of UIE’s top-rated speakers. He’ll join us at User Interface 15 in November to teach the cutting edge, research-informed, best practices for taking advantage of rich interactions. He’ll cover web forms, instantaneous sign-up processes, gradual engagement, and much more. He also has a heap of thought-provoking data and analysis of mobile Web tech and trends.

To give you a taste of that talk, Jared had a chance to speak with Luke about some of the latest trends, good and bad, in web input. Listen in to the podcast or check out the transcript.

Jared led off the discussion, by diving into one of Google’s latest public innovations, Google Instant. If you’ve missed the hubbub, Google Instant starts searching and returning suggested queries as you type.  Luke saw this technology developed during his time at Yahoo!, back in 2005. They ended up not using the technique on Yahoo!’s search because it can increase the load on the servers ten-fold.

We see this type-ahead search springing up across the web. The trick, as Luke saw first hand with Yahoo’s internal development, is doing it well. Doing so requires painstaking attention to detail, and the search itself must be tuned to the content of the site. The algorithms Google uses against their data might be very different from what an e-commerce site with only 400 products would use to provide a similar experience.

I think the ideas are really the easy part. It’s the actual implementation and details of making that idea come to life. That’s the hard part. Anyone can make these kind of off-hand comments, “We should do that”.

Luke notes that type-ahead search works quite well on Apple.com, returning intelligent results from their support pages, all as you type. The live results even feature inline images. What makes Apple’s execution of the idea notable is that they didn’t just do what everyone else is doing (suggest queries), but they adapted the idea to their site’s context.

Jared and Luke continue the discussion in the podcast, including more on in-line, dynamic interactions, like at Quora.com. They also chat about innovations in web input, where your users can instantly have their content on your site without entering it again and again. Lastly, they discuss what Luke has in store for his full-day workshop at User Interface 15. It’s a great discussion you won’t want to miss. Don’t forget to come back here and let us know your comments and questions about the topic!

Explore Luke’s workshop and the full conference program. Register for UI15 by October 19 with promotion code BLOGPOST and get $400 off.

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This week, Hugh Griffith from Boise, Idaho calls into the show. He’s curious about the pluses and minuses of replacing standard interface elements. What happens when you swap radio buttons and checkboxes with more stylish graphic replacements?

Jared and Robert discuss two major points you should consider before rolling out such changes on your site:

1. Are stylized, non-standard interface elements appropriate for the tone your site?
2. If you use graphics, do they obviously convey that they are clickable, and can you determine their current state easily?

Tune in to the podcast to hear Robert and Jared walk you through the decision process.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show!

In last week’s UIEtips, we re-published the first part of an excellent article written by Luke Wroblewski, author of Web Form Design. Luke discusses tips for improving web forms and impacting user success. (Read last week’s article.)

This week, we look at the second part of the article where Luke shares additional design tips by taking a closer look at the Boingo and British Airways Web sites.

Read the article, Web From Design in the Wild—Part 2.

If you struggle with the design of your web forms, you’ll want take part in our next UIE Virtual Seminar. Luke shares his thoughts and solutions on 6 important aspects of web form design gleaned from hundreds of questions and issues designers presented him. Learn more about Luke’s virtual seminar.

And you can also see Luke in-person at the Web App Masters Tour. We lined up 13 Masters to share their insights and help you dial up your web app design skills. The Tour visits Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Seattle from late April – July. Get more information about the Tour program and dates at www.UIETour.com. Also, if you register by April 19, and use the promotion code TIPS, you’ll pay $795/person.

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 with us and join the conversation below.

Forms are crucial for users to complete many online transactions, ranging from sign-up forms for introducing new customers to your site, to checkout forms for finalizing your users’ purchases.

In this week’s UIEtips, we’re republishing part 1 of an article written by Luke Wroblewski. He’s one of our favorite experts on web form design. Luke discusses tips for improving web forms and impacting user success. Stay tuned next week for Part II.

Read Luke’s article: Web Form Design in the Wild, Part 1

Web forms are one of the most challenging design problems. In our next UIE Virtual Seminar, Luke shares his thoughts and solutions on 6 important aspects of web form design gleaned from hundreds of questions and issues designers presented to him. Learn more about Luke’s webinar, Answered! Your Top Questions on Web Form 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 with us and join the conversation below.

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Luke Wroblewski

Web forms are the mouth that feeds most web apps. There’s no way around that. Yet, few people are thinking about how to make one of the more unpleasant parts of the web more pleasant. The world’s foremost authority on web forms is Luke Wroblewski, author of the heralded book, Web Form Design. It’s no coincidence that we lean on Luke often to join us at events like our upcoming Web App Masters Tour.

Jared Spool sat down with Luke to discuss what’s been happening with web forms since his book came out. It winds up there have been some interesting developments recently.

The first trend Jared and Luke discuss is new ways of styling forms to make them less intimidating. Perhaps the most popular form to employ a friendly and unusual form design comes from our good friend Jeremy Keith and his innovative site for finding and listening to MP3 files, HuffDuffer. Jeremy’s Huffduffer signup form is unusual to say the least. If you’ve been a parent or child in the U.S. since the 1960s, you may think the form’s design strongly resembles that of a Mad Lib.

In general, anything that reduces the stress of filling in a web form, Luke likes:

Even though Jeremy’s form on Huffduffer looks like a piece of narrative, Mad Libs-style prose, underneath the surface it’s all real input fields. It uses what they call progressive enhancement, which is the JavaScript technique where you do this baseline HTML and then gradually layer more advanced functionality.

So his form will work on a real old browser. It’ll allow people to tab between the fields like they do on a regular form. It’ll allow them to put their cursor into every field and type in there. It’s coded in a way so that it actually has labels so screen readers can use it. It has a kind of primary action at the moment, that once you get through the whole thing you can submit. It does actual error checking, and so on and so forth.

So even though it’s this example of rethinking the format of a web forum, it’s still keeping true to things that keep web forms work online. It’s not breaking them, it’s not forcing people to really shift their mindset.

And I think that’s a very interesting direction I’m seeing across the web and in many places. It’s people building on what makes web forms tick, but using new rich technologies, new more interactive format, kind of maybe persuasive design, if you will, to make filling in those important web forms less painful.

However, the visual affordances can make or break the success of the form. Since most web forms haven’t changed since 1996, people have expectations. People succeed with Jeremy’s form because it’s obvious. But poor visual design can ruin a form, as well.

Luke recounts an experience he had at Yahoo! that exemplifies this point:

We had a directory page for the podcasts, and […] at the top of the page we had this input field that was open, which allowed people to tag that podcast episode with whatever terms they wanted.

And because people saw that input field and it was towards the top of the page, they immediately thought “search field,” and they would run search queries in there.

[…] it’s that sort of muscle memory aspect of, “This looks like a search field because it’s up at the top of the page and it looks like an input field. I know what that is. Let me just go ahead and start using it.”

There a number of ways that you can validate information that someone enters into your web form, on the fly. When done correctly, this really helps people get through long forms with less frustration. However, if you’re too clever with your validation, you can make the experience even more frustrating than it would have been without your “help”. Luke provides us with several examples in the podcast. Tune in to hear his advice on how to help and not hinder your users.

Clearly you can see we’re excited to have Luke join us for our 2010 Web App Masters Tour, with his presentation, Input: Moving Beyond Static Web Forms. We’re pleased that you’ll be able to see Luke in all four tour cities, San Diego, Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Seattle. He’ll have all sorts of concrete advice you can act on immediately.

However, those aren’t the only interesting challenges Apple’s talented designers have tackled. They’ve done an amazing job with something that wouldn’t get a lot of attention otherwise: the web site checkout forms.

In the last two issues of UIEtips, Luke Wroblewski dissects the newly redesigned Apple.com checkout process. As always, his critique is brilliant, providing a ton of great tips for anyone designing interactive forms. I know you’ll enjoy it.

Read the article – The Apple Store’s Checkout Form Redesign, Part 1
and
Read the article – The Apple Store’s Checkout Form Redesign, Part 2

Luke is a Master of web forms and that is why we asked him to be part of the UIE Web App Masters Tour taking place in 4 different cities from March – July 2010. Luke will show you how to move beyond static web forms by leveraging the best of today’s technologies and capabilities. Learn more about the Tour, Luke’s topic, and the other Masters at http://www.UIETour.com.

What do you think of Apple’s redesign? Did they do it right or would you have changed it? We’d love to know your thoughts below.

Joining the other seven presenters for our two-day deep dive into all things wonderful about Web Apps will be:

Hagan Rivers

I’ll say it: I love Hagan. She’s an amazing designer who knows her stuff. And, unlike many designers, she’s really great at explaining the why behind her design. She’s presented at our previous Web App Summit and User Interface Conference events, always delighting the crowd.

Hagan was involved in the first web-based applications, back when she worked for Netscape in ye olde early days, where she was the lead designer on versions 1.0 through 4.0. You don’t get much more in-the-trenches experience than that. Now, she’s at Two Rivers Consulting, where she’s still pushing the envelope in web app design.

Luke Wroblewski

I think of Luke as a wunderkind. Like Hagan, he started in the early days of the web, working at NCSA where the original Mosaic browser was born. He then moved on to eBay and is now Chief Design Architect for Yahoo!, where he works on designs used every day by Yahoo!’s 700 million users.

Luke’s first book, Site Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability, was what brought my attention to him. But it’s his most recent book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, that I think really shows his talents. You’d think a book about Web Forms would be boring, but from the first words (“Forms suck.”), he had me. (In fact, I just noticed my copy of his book has gone missing—again! This will be the third time I’ve replaced it. Keep good track of yours as they like to walk away.)

Luke’s been speaking at our events for years and is also one of our top-rated speakers. So we’re thrilled he’ll be joining us on the tour.

Both Luke & Hagan will be at all four stops on the tour, starting in San Diego.

Get Notified As More Details Come Along

What’s that? You want to be notified on additional details and registration? No problem, just leave us your email address and we’ll send you a quick note when we have more information.

Stay tuned as the next thing is to announce the San Diego schedule and what each of our masters will be speaking on. I can’t wait to hear them!