Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Full-day Workshop, 8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.

Luke Wroblewski

Web Form Design Best Practices

Luke Wroblewski, Yahoo! and LukeW Interface Designs

Are you unsure whether your web site's crucial forms are optimized to ensure business success? Are you having trouble convincing stakeholders that your forms need simplification? Are you unsure of which form design solution is right for your specific context? Do you know if your web forms are delighting your users and catering to their needs?

In the world of Web applications, forms bridge the gap between people, their information, and your product or service. From registration forms that welcome new customers to checkout forms that finalize e-commerce transactions, web forms frequently broker crucial online interactions. Many organizations know their sign-up, contact, or checkout forms are fundamental to their success, but they aren't sure if these key interactions could be better designed.

To help design teams realize the full potential of their web forms and turn forms into delightful experiences, we've turned to Luke Wroblewski, author of the upcoming book, Web Form Design Best Practices, to share his design considerations and best practices on form design culled from more than eleven years of designing Web applications.

Through presentations, discussions, and hands-on exercises, Luke will show you how the interaction and visual design of web forms can make the difference between acquiring a customer, completing a transaction, or not.

In this workshop, you will learn:

  • How to decide which interface elements make the most sense for your form. You will learn how different types of forms, input fields, input labels, validation, feedback, calls to action, and surrounding visual elements can support or impair different aspects of user behavior.
  • How to agree on and organize the content in your forms. You will learn techniques for deciding what questions to ask, explain, postpone or not ask at all. You will also learn how to organize the questions that do need to be included and how to present them to the people filling out your forms.
  • The importance of form interaction. You will learn about and discuss a wide variety of form interaction techniques. Specifically, you will see examples of forms using inline validation, dynamic input fields, selection-dependent input fields, and gradual engagement.
  • How the design of your form can help or hinder customer success. Feedback and messaging in forms is of the utmost importance when helping users complete your forms successfully. Each form input field has a label that tells the customer what information to put in that field. Where the field is placed has a potential impact on successful form completion. You will learn how labels placed above the field, to the left of the field, or either left-aligned or right-aligned determine how quickly your customers complete the form.
  • How to tailor form length to your users. You'll learn how to walk through the questions asked to determine if any can be cut or postponed. You'll begin to approach your form as a conversation and examine the divisions that naturally emerge. Then you'll learn how to verify this information through a web conventions survey and use question count and emergent structure to organize your form across one or more pages based on the information you gathered. You'll also explore different ways of thinking about how to sign up users without requiring painful forms.

Organizations everywhere have begun to see how successful web forms can increase key metrics. For example:

  • Yahoo!'s redesigned registration forms utilize a number of techniques to ease the registration process and bring more members to the site.
  • Geni's start-up process provides an understanding of what the site is about and why customers should care instead forcing people to fill out a sign-up form.
  • eBay Express utilizes form organization and interaction principles to optimize commercial transactions.

This seminar is appropriate for many members of the development team, including:

  • Visual Designers responsible for the look and feel of a web form
  • Web Developers and Designers responsible for the design and development of web form
  • Product Managers responsible for monitoring the performance of a web form
  • Interaction Designers responsible with defining the behavior and structure of a web form
  • Usability Professionals responsible for making web form recommendations based on the results of usability testing
  • Anyone that has ever designed or built web forms and is looking for new tips on improving a wide variety of forms

No prerequisite knowledge is needed except an understanding of the importance of web forms and their wide range of potential design solutions. After this workshop, you'll never look at web forms the same way again.