Web Form Design (Book Review)
Friday, September 26th, 2008
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.
