Best Practices for form design is a slideshow on the topic of… form design! Boom! Hopefully not a surprise, however I did find a few things in the slides a little surprising.
Vertical labels often lead to the fastest form completion times – I like vertical labels because they usually require simpler HTML, so I’m happy now to have another reason to recommend them. The pros and cons for the other layout options also make for interesting reading.
Avoid optional fields – when you read this as a best practise recommendation you stop and pause for a moment – “Hang on, you want me to make everything mandatory?” .. which is completely missing the point. The point is don’t ask for anything you don’t really need. Why ask for my phone number, office number, and mobile number – why not just ask me for one number and let me give you the one I want you to use?
Also some obvious things (in hindsight) which I’m guilty of not doing in the past, such as styling/placing ‘secondary’ actions according to their importance (i.e. very little). Recently while re-styling the Ignition website, my friend Steve commented that the ‘Clear’ button on the contact form should be removed – it made me stop and ask why I’d even put it there in the first place? Sometimes this stuff can lurk in your applications simply because no one questions whoever put it there in the first place, even if that person didn’t have a good reason for doing so.
Summary – as with many things on the web, designing and laying out forms is a subtle art which can greatly affect a user’s experience of your site. I suspect most web developers will pick up a thing or two from the slides, which are well worth reading.
Tags: Web Development
About me
My name is Ross Hawkins and I'm a developer, consultant, business owner and writer based in Auckland,
New Zealand (pictured below!). My current work revolves around ASP.NET, C#, jQuery, Ajax,
SQL Server, and a mix of other Microsoft development technologies.
I also have about 15 years of experience with IBM Lotus Notes/Domino and associated technologies. While Notes/Domino
is no longer my primary focus I still like to dabble and keep my skills up to date.
I own and run 2 businesses - Hawkins Consulting Services,
and Ignition Development.
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