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“The location of visual elements in the UI has a huge impact on how the user interprets information.” Rick Oppedisan, 2002 |
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Impact of Removing Registration07.23.2008 by LukeWIn Sign Up Forms Must Die, I advocated ways to get people engaged and interested in Web applications and services without requiring an explicit sign-up form. In many cases, registration is an obstacle that prevents people from exploring and engaging with an application.
10% Sign up Improvement with one Change07.20.2008 by LukeWMarcello Calbucci recently shared some details behind the design of the Sampa sign up form. Sampa is a free Web site service that requires users to register before they set up a site and saw a 10% increase in sign-ups with one change: removing CAPTCHA.
Web Symposium: Web Form Design Best Practices07.18.2008 by LukeWIn my Web Form Design Best Practices talk at the Higher Education Web Symposium in Philadelphia, PA, I walked thorugh the importance of Web forms and a series of design best practices culled from live to site analytics, usability testing, eye-tracking studies, and best practice surveys.My Slides from the talk: Best Practices For Web Form Design (4.1 MB PDF) Some of the topics I discuss and provide patterns for are: label alignment, required form filed, input field sizes, content grouping, primary & secondary actions, help text & tips, dyanmic help systems, inline validation, error messages, progress indicators, success messaging, progressive disclosure, gradual engagement, tabbing, flexible data inputs, smart defaults, paths to completion, selection dependent inputs, and more... For more on Form Design... Check out Luke's book about Web form usability, visual design, and interaction design considerations: Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. | Tags: forms, guidelines, interaction design, visual communication, usability, UI components | TrackBacks: 0Gourmet Experiences on a Fast-Food Budget07.17.2008 by LukeWIn his Cooking up Gourmet Experiences on a Fast-Food Budget keynote at the Higher Education Web Symposium in Philadelphia, PA Jared Spool discussed it takes to make great experiences without a big budget.
Product Manager's Dreams07.13.2008 by LukeWDesigner: "Designers visualize Product Managers' dreams. Developers make the dreams work."Design manager: "Designers turn product manager's responsibilities into things customers dream about." Sign-Up Form Patterns07.09.2008 by LukeWThough, I've long advocated that Sign-Up Forms Must Die, for now they remain a staple of online life. Recently Smashing Magazine surveyed the landscape of sign-up forms by looking at patterns in 100 popular Web destinations and their registration forms . The data they extracted is a catalog of existing practices and as a result should not be considered design recommendations. However, it is interesting to see these trends and ultimately if they change over time.
For more on Form Design... Check out Luke's book about Web form usability, visual design, and interaction design considerations: Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. Web Form Design: Goodreads Review07.07.2008 by LukeWOn the Goodreads site, Marty DeAngelo posted a detailed review of my new book Web Form Design: For anyone that works on the web, forms are going to be something you deal with at one time or another. Usually, it's an experience in trying to get a form to do what YOU want it to do without regard to what the customer really wants or needs. However, I've been working on a bunch of projects recently where I really need to consider what the customer wants because one of our main goals is to get users to register, and I know how fickle they are when it comes to signing up for things. So, this book was not only interesting but very timely. The best thing about the book is how well written it is. It's fairly simplistic in getting its point across, using a lot of illustrations to really drive home the points that the author is trying to get across. His tone and personality really mesh with how the book is presented, making it almost conversational as he explains some of the major concepts and then delves deeper into the best ways to develop and present forms. Each chapter is relatively short (about 8 - 21 pages), but chock full of good advice. The succession will also help people trying to make their forms better work their way into more and more elaborate ways of creating 'bulletproof' forms. While you won't get as far in-depth as you might need on any given topic (I wanted to know more about error messaging, a personal anathema right now) or much about the coding of the pages, the principals and direction are dead on. As I said, the language and personality Wroblewski - whose credentials include former Lead Usability Designer at eBay, founding member of Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and current "Senior Principal of Product Ideation and Design" at Yahoo! - create a more approachable presentation than you might think from someone who is one of the leaders in usable design. Less teacher and expert-on-high and more friendly "have a beer and chat" usability guru, I found it easy to get sucked into one chapter and not look back until 3 chapters later. The examples he uses are also top-notch. Granted, he has a great body of work to pull from, but he does a great job of using examples from a breadth of industries and user types -- everything from Fortune 500 banks to e-commerce to new Web 2.0 social networks are represented, showing that good form design isn't for any single audience. The illustrations are also well-placed in showing principles and comparisons between different methods, adding to the ease with which someone can learn how to build the better form. His information comes from more than just his own experiences, though. Several key studies provide relevant data that give credence to the ideas presented here. He's not afraid to say, 'It depends' when it does or to say that while something might be a bad idea for the most part (and here's way), that you couldn't make it work in some limited situation. He offers what seems to be the best way to accomplish certain things within a form, without putting his own personal feelings into it (well, for the most part - and when he does, it's always in a humorous manner). And this is a book that anyone can use - not overlay-laden with technical terms, it's instead a thorough but amazingly understandable set of observations, suggestions and instructions on how to make the forms you are creating eminently more usable for all those involved - but most especially for the customers or visitors of the sites we're building. I needed it to answer a couple specific questions I had, but it quickly opened up other paths and solutions for me I wasn't yet considering. At this point, I have to say that this is probably one of the best UX books I've read. It might not be as thorough and ground-breaking as Saffer's "Designing for Interaction" or Zeldman's "Designing with Web Standards", but for the specificity of the topic, it really does a great job a covering all of the bases and giving real-world, actionable examples and guidance. A great buy - and I think that if you , you also get a PDF version (great because it's searchable." -By Marty DeAngelo from Goodreads You can get Web Form Design from Rosenfeld Media. You can also get it at Amazon.com, but for the same price, Rosenfeld Media includes a nicely formatted digital version. |
Functioning Form is published by LukeW Interface Designs © 1996-2006. |