Web Form Design (Book Review)
What makes or breaks your website? Seriously, as sucky as web forms can be they are probably the single most important measure your visitors will judge your site by. If you’ve got an e-commerce site and the forms suck you’ll go broke very rapidly. A social network with shitty form interactions and you’ll have about minus three people in the conversation. And, contrary to popular belief in the industry it’s not irrelevant how you ask questions, where you place form fields and when you make your play for that extra supplementary question.
Forms make or break your websites. Because of that I picked up a copy of Luke Wroblewski’s widely referred Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, published by Rosenfeld Media.
The simple fact is that forms can be pretty boring. Our own bad experiences on the web have scarred us to the other fact that forms are important. Unfortunately forms are often treated as superficial add-ons to a web solution or they just flick over to the graphic designers to make them look pretty. However, this shouldn’t be the case. Web forms are challenging, and from a user experience perspective they’re even an interesting area of study.
The tricky part about forms is that for a large part they’ve been that black box magic area of web design. But with more recent studies in eyetracking user behaviour and the growing age of our industry that allows for better understanding of what does and doesn’t work, there is now a lot you can do to improve your site’s user experience through intelligent form design. For example, you might look for areas where questions can be avoided, you can reorganise your forms so they are not as cognitively heavy on the user, or you can rethink your questions. The aim is to make your forms almost, or even, invisible to the user. Dare I say enjoyable? Well, that’s the aim.
The objective of this book is simply to rectify the Waterloo attitude of many interface designers who just see forms as something people hate and which can’t be addressed. Forms in that world are like medicine. Fortunately that isn’t entirely true. Sometimes a small subtle change can significantly increase conversions or sales figures. It’s just a matter of being as interested in that area of user interaction as the rest of the design.
While much of this book I felt I already knew, or somehow perceived deep down, there were several key pieces of new knowledge I took away from the reading. Those pieces that had never occured to me more than paid for the price of the book.
I also like that Rosenfeld Media sell the digital copy for $19 which is completely free of DRM (Digital Rights Management) protections. That’s both affordable and you can flick the information to a team member when the conversation requires. I enjoyed the read and gleaned a lot of useful information out of it’s chapters.
Update: 28 September, 2008
By the way, Louis Rosenfeld sent a discount code. If you enter the word CLARK when purchasing you get a 10% discount.
I should point out that I don’t get anything, I don’t do affiliate marketing deals. This is entirely from Rosenfeld Media. Regards.
