Usable Forms

May 30, 2003 | 1 Comments

This week in Digital Web, Peter-Paul Koch writes about making forms more usable via the W3C DOM.

Most of these tips are technical in nature, showing way to use Javascript and the DOM to implement features that will increase a forms usability. Along the way he points to some very good tips and more resources on making usable forms.

I’ve recently had to do quite a bit of research in this area myself and I’m in the process of pulling all that I gleaned to share with everyone. For now I’ll give you a few of the more important, easy to tackle ways to make forms more usable. Kind of an executive summary.

• Plan for your form, understand the back-end processes before building, talk to the users of the form and those who handle it. This is the most important step, often overlooked.
• Keep forms as short as possible. Eliminate, don’t simply hide, unused fields wherever possible. It’s a good idea to present a user only those fields they will need to fill out.
• Be very clear. Tell the user what they are supposed to do using focused language, and blurbs describing actions.
• Group similar fields together. If your form is really long think about breaking it into smaller forms.
• When the form has been submitted make sure the user knows that they are done.
• Use server-side validation if possible, this will help to cut down on user error.
• Lose the “reset” button, it’s a common mistake for a user to hit this by accident
• Do your best to have a good contingency solution, let the users know what you want as clearly as possible when a field doesn’t validate

Most of this is pretty common sense, but I can assure you that many forms need usability work. Like making most things usable, just thinking about it and talking with the users can make a world of difference.

More on this topic to come.

Filed under: IA and Usability