An Introduction
Welcome to the working site for my upcoming Web Form Design Best Practices book. (That's a working title too!). I'm looking forward to sharing ideas, research, and design considerations with everyone here over the coming months as I write the book.
So why write a book about form design? If you are in online retail, your goal is to sell things. But standing in the way of your products and your customers is a checkout form. If you are developing social software or open peer productions systems, your goal is to grow your community. Standing in between you and community members is a form. If you've built a productivity based Web application, forms enable key interactions that let people create and manage content. So in commerce, customer aquisition, and online productivity -forms play a pivotal role. As a result, form design matters.
Of course no one likes filling forms. People simply want to get the product you are selling, to socialize, or to get their work done. From their perspective forms just get in the way.
Understanding the principles of form design gives you the ability to minimze pain for people and maximize business success. It's my hope Web Form Design Best Practices provides that understanding. On this site, I'll be discussing how. Hope you'll join me!
Comments
I'm really looking forward to this book Luke. I've already got a great template setup so I can keep my XHTML for my forms the same but simply swap a few classes to make the forms appear top, right or left aligned depending on whether the data needed is familiar or unfamiliar. I noticed your latest post on FF titled Row Highlighting in Web Forms. I'm doing this on a current project as I picked up that neat technique from www.wufoo.com and so far its gone well. Do you plan on maybe covering that topic in your book??
Posted by: Javier Julio | April 25, 2007 11:23 AM
Looks like a great idea for a book, Luke. Really seems to be the way things are heading...toward an activity-based, application-centric model of design. Can't wait till it comes out!
Posted by: Joshua Porter | April 25, 2007 01:31 PM
Luke, great subject for a book. I've been a big fan of your many articles about forms and look forward to a book dedicated solely to this subject.
Best of luck as you work on it!
Posted by: Harold | April 25, 2007 03:42 PM
This book can't arrive soon enough.
Posted by: customer-centered | April 26, 2007 02:09 PM
BTW, if you want some help with it please let me know. I'm here in Mtn. View (eves) and Cupertino (days) and more than willing to support you in any way permitted.
Posted by: customer-centered | April 26, 2007 02:11 PM
Javier, I do plan to cover the row highlight technique. I don't have any hard metrics on its impact but the Wufoo folks are going to provide me with information on how things are used on their product so there may be some learnings there. If you have any performance data, let me know.
Josh, Have to admit you played a role in getting this book together by asking me to do a talk on forms at the Web App Summit. That was a big catalyst, so thanks.
Harold, thank you.
Michael, help is certianly appreciated. I'll follow up via email~
Posted by: LukeW | April 26, 2007 11:00 PM
I would really appreciate it if you could not only focus on form interface design, but interaction design with forms. Specifically, forms that use Javascript or Flash/Flex to enable effects. This topic appears to be covered in your TOC, but just want to make sure :)
Posted by: Geof Harries | April 30, 2007 12:10 PM
Hi Geoff, I will be discussing interaction design of forms extensively but not focusing on any particular technologies (Flex, JS, etc.). In other words, interaction design principles and best practices but no code as I am not a developer :)
thanks~
Posted by: LukeW | April 30, 2007 02:03 PM
Will you also be covering on help text for form fields (automatic or user activated help/tip)?? I've seen many forms, some display them (regardless of the space they take) or by default they are hidden (they are shown when the user has focused on that field). I have a lot of interest in knowing which technique you would consider and what some of the best practices are. Just curious to see if this is something you will go into further detail with your new book. I will give you any info I can get from our client on what they think about the form row highlighting technique. I'll keep you updated, thanks!
Posted by: Javier Julio | May 4, 2007 11:54 AM
Javier, yes. I'll be covering a number of help systems for forms inlcuding user activated & automatic systems and inline or sectional versions of both. You can see some of these samples in my Best Practices for Web Form Design 3.9 MB PDF. Looking forward to seeing how row highlight is working for you, thanks~
Posted by: LukeW | May 5, 2007 10:47 PM
Hello,
I've been looking at how to create a webform, with row highlighting activated as the user clicks on a field in the form. I found this great tutorial that uses tables and a row higlighting function that works on rollover:
http://stevenharman.net/blog/archive/2006/09/14/Mouse_Over_Row_Highlighting__Redux.aspx
I'm hoping to find an example of how to achieve this with field activation as opposed to mouse rollover. I'm not saavy with programming language at all, so any examples would be greatly appreciated! Not sure if you will have one in your book...
Many thanks,
Josh
Posted by: Josh Mitchell | December 14, 2007 05:36 PM
Hi Josh, Unfortunately, I'm not a developer so I can't help with your question. My upcoming book covers Web design principles, not code or programming samples. For examples, here's how I would discuss row highlighting:
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?508
thanks~
Posted by: LukeW | December 15, 2007 09:43 PM