As I noted in my previous entry I was somehow busy these days. So this entry comes a little bit late but not too late. On the 17th of March I’ve held a spoken presentation at Wurbe no 7 at Adobe Romania about usability and web forms. My presentation clocked near 20 minutes plus some time for questions.
There was little “how to” in my presentation but I tackled some concepts known less in the Romanian web sphere. The idea is to make forms more usable by clearly stating the rules, do everything you can to prevent errors and trust the user.
Here are the slides.
Fields should be clearly labeled, and an extra explanation for every one is sometimes necessary. Why are you asking me my email address? How is the username used? Does the password have restrictions? The user must find quick answers for all this questions. Also all the buttons must reveal what they do, as “submit” is plain wrong. Don’t be afraid to use more than one word: “Add the entry”, “Save the article”, “Delete the user”.
Don’t use modal warnings! Questions like “Are you sure you want to save?” as you will trigger the “don’t read, just press continue” instinct. Use “undo” instead and only warn when the action cannot be undone. Gmail has a lovely example of undo in action.
When a field is filled with problematic content use javascript to warn the user. Check that the username and email are not used already. Disable the form submitting button and explain how errors occurred and how to correct them. Also a good move is to prevent users from forgetting their authentication data like their username. A solution would be to ask for the email at log in or(better) provide OpenID as an option.
The easiness to reach a point is proportional with its size and inversely proportional with the distance to it.
One can also benefit from Fitts’s Law. Buttons that are safe to press should be big and near his focus and dangerous buttons like delete should be smaller and more remote. In this way mistakes are harder to happen.
This opinion spawned the most controversy. I believe that excessive rules shouldn’t be imposed. Asking the user to separate telephone numbers by dashes or spaces or other stupid rules that fall in this category are wrong. Asking him for an US zip code when he selected another country as his residence is stupid. Boy, how many times have I filled bogus numbers in those fields.
Not to mention password recovery questions. How can I enter real content when all my friends will know the answer to those questions? I always put there bogus answers which, guess what, I never remember. Purpose defeated.
But when I say trusting the user it doesn’t mean trusting him to enter only true data. It’s about trusting that he will make an intelligent decision whether he wants to give you that data or not. So the conclusion is: check only for accidents and, most important, gain the user’s trust. I believe in the end the quality of the data you collect is far higher by using this approach.
The presentation was a success in my opinion as it raised some problems we should talk more about. You can see pictures from the presentation on flickr. I want to thank Adobe Romania for their hospitality towards Wurbe and to congratulate the other speakers for their top notch presentations.
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