Comments on: Form Design is Good Form

By: Jason

Jason — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:48:35 +0000

What a sad thing that form design and relational database interactions receive the least attention generally for webs. How many times have I winced at clicking on a new partition for part of a phone number when any separations of boxes should include an auto rollover from one part to the other? Why aren’t ip logs routinely referenced to visitor lookup tables to eliminate multiple entries? Etc., etc.
Comment love is sort of a good idea, but I think you go about it the wrong way (for general application). It would be nice–especially for large traffic sites–to have a widget next to a comment in the shape of a pie chart. When the user clicks on it, they call up a function that allows them to set donation for the comment up to a blogger-specified max price. Then they could set partitions in the pie chart to decide who and what %age the money would go to: charity, blogger and/or commenter (in the latter case, where there were store functions it could be a discount against merchandise, eg). I think this would probably work best with moderated invite-only posts where there was high traffic. But rotating the segments of a pie chart and autocorrecting the partitioned %ages of the sum total would make a nice toy for bloggees to play with (is that a new word?). Any hoo, good article.

By: Jason Bartholme’s SEO Blog » Blog Archive » 101 Resources to Help You Build a Better Web Form

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 13:34:33 +0000

[…] Form Design is Good Form - somerandomdude.net […]

By: mtnclmbr123

mtnclmbr123 — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 22:34:27 +0000

this was pretty freaking helpful and gave me some awesome ideas. i really appreciate you blogging about this for us non-designers.

By: Akhil

Akhil — Sat, 26 May 2007 00:06:56 +0000

This gave me a quick ideas on how i could help my group complete the interface to our project. Thanks for the tips, will pass them on now…..

By: Adi

Adi — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 16:32:17 +0000

Pingback from On form design

By: somerandomdude

somerandomdude — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 17:05:57 +0000

Yeah, it’s an interesting idea at least. I personally think trying to get more marketing and demographics information through the registration is a bad idea as it can keep people from filling out the form entirely. Rather, I like to see information-on-demand - where users fill out vital information when they need to perform a task.

For community sites, I think allowing them to fill out age, location, interests, etc. for a public profile will lend itself to much more accurate information. We all have done the infamous rapid form fillout where every field is given ‘adsf’ or ‘999999′. If the user actually is filling out a form for his/her own immediate needs/interests, the chance of getting real data is much more likely.

By: kellie kat

kellie kat — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 04:56:50 +0000

I’ve NEVER thought of forms in the analytical way that you have. Excellent job! I really agree with your theory regarding the correlation between Myspace’s billion users and their ultra simple, 30 second or less form.

This is really an amazing entry PJ. I learned something new today.

By: somerandomdude

somerandomdude — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 20:04:39 +0000

Thanks for the comments guys.

Jon from Monday By Noon - Thanks so much. I recently had done some significant form design on a current project and it really facilitated this article coming to fruition.

Ryan - so true. I think that could be an article in and of itself.

Andrew - Yeah, good point. Tabbed navigation is an issue. I still feel most users navigate through forms with the mouse, I am assuming that is who they are catering to. Nonetheless, you’re right, they should take power users into consideration.

Anonymous Jon - There are a myriad of design problems with this website that I would love to detail in another post. However, I suggest we concentrate on the content of the article as a means to critique my thoughts I raised in the article.

By: jon

jon — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 18:10:07 +0000

Oooh and you could even add cursor: pointer to this here submit button.

If you took care of these minor things I might start thinking you knew what you were talking bout.

By: jon

jon — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 18:08:59 +0000

How bout styling this here comment form. The default font is a monspaced font - you could even choose a nicer font style here and even add a 1px black border to this here text box like you have for the other form elements.