UX Blog » forms

Now bare with me on this – I found a blog site which contains a review of a really useful site containing UX libraries, which is doubly noteworthy because it presents the patterns in a very usable and very lovely UI.

So, my dilemma is do I post a link to the review or direct to the site with the patterns?

I’ll start by posting a link to the blog site I found the link on, as the blog owner, Patrick Neeman does a really nice job of explaining the patterns site’s features:

Patrick Neeman’s blog: http://www.usabilitycounts.com/2009/02/03/cool-website-tuesdays-infragistics-quince/

And Patrick’s comment:

I can never say Infragistics right, but they produce top notch controls for the ASP.NET world. Now they have something else that is way cool: Quince, a great little directory of user interface patterns that is built using SilverLight. J. Ambrose Little, a User Experience guy over there, wrote an extensive blog post about the new tool.
You can navigate through different patterns four different ways (I find user tasks especially useful), search them via keyword, and see sort through them by letter. Very, very easy to use.
The best part? If you have a design pattern you want to submit, you can do it through the site, and the Infragistics team will review it and post it. It’s got all the requisite social networking tools with it!

And here’s a couple of screenshots of the Quince site:

Quince patterns explorer - View by wireframe location

Quince patterns explorer - Pattern detail

Followed by the all important link: http://quince.infragistics.com/

Enjoy!

The $300 Million Button

Barry — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:55:48 +0000

Here’s a great article from Jared M. Spool of uie.com that explains how a simple button on a form can strongly users’ perceptions, and how removing said button can alter the user journey with quite dramatic results:

Extract:

While Luke Wroblewski was writing his well-received book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, he asked if I could think of an example where a change in a form’s design made a noticeable difference in business. “You mean like $300 million of new revenue?” I responded. “Yes, like that.” said Luke. So I wrote this article, which he published in his book.

Original article: http://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button

Web Application Form Design

Barry — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 10:30:26 +0000

This site has been around for some time, but Luke’s work is arguably some of the most definitive in the field of web form design, so its always worth re-iterating.

Web Application Form Design
by Luke Wroblewski
http://www.lukew.com/resources/articles/web_forms.html

Here’s a couple of examples of some of his findings:

Vertical labels

Left-Justified horizontal labels

His online articles form the basis of a book, available through Rosenfeld Media: Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. I heartily recommend it!

EULA checkbox variations

Barry — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:46:29 +0000

I read an interesting discussion over at ixda.org today regarding best practice around checkboxes for accepting terms and conditions…

http://www.ixda.org/discuss.php?post=36484

This response by Christian Crumlish (who it appears works for Yahoo) caught my eye as it seems to be not only well considered, but easy to understand, neat and fairly comprehensive.

Here it is in a nutshell:

Consent to the agreement is expressed in the call-to-action button (‘Agree and Continue’).
The form offers an option to exit without agreeing (‘Cancel’ or ‘Don’t Agree / Cancel Order’).
A statement makes clear that submitting the form constitutes agreement to the terms (‘By clicking you agree…’).
The terms of service (TOS) text is available via a clearly labeled hypertext link (Terms of Service).
The TOS copy is supplied in a printable format.

Sounds sensible to me.