Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability

by Caroline Jarrett, Gerry Gaffney, Steve Krug (Foreword)

Forms that Designing Web Forms for Usability clearly explains exactly how to design great forms for the web. The book provides proven and practical advice that will help you avoid pitfalls, and produce forms that are aesthetically pleasing, efficient and cost-effective. It features invaluable design methods, tips, and tricks to help ensure accurate data and satisfied customers. It includes dozens of examples - from nitty-gritty details (label alignment, mandatory fields) to visual designs (creating good grids, use of color).

This book isn’t just about colons and choosing the right widgets. It’s about the whole process of making good forms, which has a lot more to do with making sure you’re asking the right questions in a way that your users can answer than it does with whether you use a drop-down list or radio buttons. In an easy-to-read format with lots of examples, the authors present their three-layer model - relationship, conversation, appearance. You need all three for a successful form - a form that looks good, flows well, asks the right questions in the right way, and, most important of all, gets people to fill it out. Liberally illustrated with full-color examples, this book guides readers on how to define requirements, how to write questions that users will understand and want to answer, and how to deal with instructions, progress indicators and errors.

This book is essential reading for HCI professionals, web designers, software developers, user interface designers, HCI academics and students, market research professionals, and financial professionals.

*Provides proven and practical advice that will help you avoid pitfalls, and produce forms that are aesthetically pleasing, efficient and cost-effective. *Features invaluable design methods, tips, and tricks to help ensure accurate data and satisfied customers. *Includes dozens of examples -- from nitty-gritty details (label alignment, mandatory fields) to visual designs (creating good grids, use of color).*Foreword by Steve Krug, author of the best selling Don't Make Me Think!

Genres: Design, Nonfiction, Web, Usability, Business, Technology, Website Design

199 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2008

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Please don't take my three-star review the wrong way. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this book. I liked the presentation. I thought it was very clever to illustrate the end-user thought processes with callouts next to screen shots of good and bad web form examples (example: "Why do I have to enter the same information twice?").

Maybe I think about web forms more on a regular basis than your average bear. There simply wasn't anything in this book's 200 pages that I haven't already thought about pretty hard on my own. Now, I don't want to be that guy who says, "I already knew all of this." (And it was nice to have my own personal opinions about web forms confirmed.) But, I can't wax ecstatic about a book from which I didn't personally gain any new insights. I was hoping for some "a-ha!" moments.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad this book exists. Very glad. I hope that it sells tons of copies and that people who aren't aware of these issues change their evils ways! I get just as irritated (actually probably a lot more irritated) as anyone when I have to fill out bad, confusing, unfriendly web forms. The people who created those need to read this book! Or at least have somebody roll it up and hit them upside the head with it. Hard.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate historically where this book sits, but unfortunately I can’t fully recommend it as a current read since it’s fairly outdated, and it shows in some of the suggestions and best practices. For context on age, this was written in the days of Windows Vista and macOS Aqua. That being said, I think the ideas and principles behind the book are solid, especially the focus on user testing and treating the form as a conversation where you need to build trust, and where timing is important.

What I loved:

I especially love the attention Jarrett brings to accessibility of forms. At one point she calls out that for people using screen magnifiers, information is often pushed off the screen. I work in software accessibility and usability and this is a really common issue that I see, and causes a lot of issues for people in other contexts, like having the browser itself zoomed in, or using an ultra wide screen (or too small a screen, like Chromebook, such that it initiates horizontal scrolling). Sidebar overlays often pop up entirely outside the user’s focus or visual field.

I also loved the part about handling stakeholder interactions with information asked on forms - especially around the purposes of the information and the privacy of the information once provided. And she offered practical solutions: “Record your decisions and make sure you have offered formal and informal opportunities to stakeholders to get involved.” This has been something I had to deal with in the past, and its really valuable having actionable steps to rein in stakeholders from requesting a bunch of information for really vague reasons.

My main criticisms:

Changes in technologies and standards, like autofill technology or touch based interaction with forms, aren’t touched on. A lot of the resources mentioned are also deprecated - you can find them using Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine if you search back to ~2008, but it’s a fair bit of hassle, and once I got it the information was…. not really relevant anymore. It really takes a toll on the usefulness of some of the advice being offered, like the suggestion of waiting til the end of the page to provide any validation. For long or arduous forms, this violates that conversation format that she advocates, and we have a lot more gently helpful validation and smart-formatting options nowadays that can be used more effectively. Also she mentions not being able to find tabbed form examples. There are a LOT of forms that use tabs to segment forms nowadays, but they tend to be very specialized, like setting up cloud databases or other software infrastructure.

Another piece is the information on fonts, mostly since I also find typography fascinating. It was really interesting hearing the historical background of when legibility research was done and the contexts at the time driving a lot of their findings rather than some universally readable font, and the details for on-screen readability of Verdana. But. The mention of using fonts at a large enough point size for its details to work doesn’t make sense with the W3C recommendations since 2001 to use SVG font files, which shouldn’t have an issue with scaling to the proper font size for detail visibility (not to mention phone screens nowadays have a higher ppi than printers).

Overall:

All in all, I appreciate the book and think it was well done, but I’d take some of the best practices with a grain of salt, particularly regarding form validation.

[Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jarrett and Gaffney have written a very practical book for people who design forms. They've limited their examples to Web forms, but the principles they are espousing apply as well to forms on other systems, and to paper forms up to and including the tax forms we all know and love, whatever country we call home.

The authors take us from considerations of the relationship between the form and its filler to "the truth" about planning a form for success in a number of different languages. Sometimes it's too early to ask the user to give you a credit card number. And some languages will require you to lay out the form in a different order, so leaving extra room for longer field titles might not be enough.

This book is staying on my "consult" shelf next to my desk. I expect to look at it often.

[Nathanael Coyne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good introduction to forms but not substantial enough to be a useful ongoing reference to hit developers over the head with. Many of the examples could have been additionally abstracted and analysed; the principles and guidance seemed unsubstantiated, giving the book a feeling of lack of credibility, although as I know the authors are experienced I was happy to overlook this. Others might not be so forgiving. Book could have easily been twice as long.

[Alyssa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd love an updated version. I read this for work after loving Surveys That Work. I had no issues disregarding advice that had changed (whether a little or a lot), but I found that this was best when paired with talks with the authors from more recent years. Good bones tho! And I'm glad I read the books in the order I did .

[Tiger Abrodi · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best part of the book was that I was able to apply things right away to my project. ❤️

The book is short, but IMO extremely important, bad forms can cost companies a lot of money! 🔥

[Alaeddin Hallak · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome book on Web forms usability. Short and to the point. Lots of examples and funny illustrations. I've used this book as a basis for a public presentation I gave (in Arabic).

http://vimeo.com/9488513

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really useful - a lot of things you'd already know / common sense, if you already have some background knowledge of web form usability. Still some points and tips for those that aren't new.

If you are new - great read!~

[Melissainau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very practical, easy to read primer

[Julaine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great, practical advice.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very useful book. A bit hard to read at times.

[Laurian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dated but really good.

[Ruslan]

from don't make me think book