Nice validation
Big, clear. I like.
Add comment April 8th, 2008
Site Feedback - How Not to Ask for It
Poking around the Genentech Web site for some contact information, I noticed in the footer a stylish, simple way of asking for visitor feedback:
I thought, hey, this is a nice graphical approach. A visitor can quickly get the idea of what’s going on: negative/low level of yellow for a “poor” Web site experience and positive/high yellow for a “good” experience. Unfortunately, when you click on the box, what you actually get is:
Holy! I particularly enjoy question 1: “How would you classify yourself?” How about “annoyed and somewhat overwhelmed by your crazed quest for superficial knowledge?” Everything I’ve read tells me that, although nicely compact, this form is a scanning nightmare. My approximation of such would be:
Really, isn’t the only question that you’d care about the very last one? “Did you find what you were looking for?” and if not, why? What was missing? This entire form could be reduced to two radio buttons and a text area.
Add comment January 24th, 2008
Form Design - Labels
I attended the User Interface 12 conference in October, and found Luke Wroblewski of Yahoo! to be a very good, informative and, heck, even entertaining speaker (Jakob Nielsen take note). Particularly, Luke’s talk on form design and the scannability of form labels directly applied to some recent projects of my own. I went looking for the transcript, but found an article he’d written on the same topic for Jared Spool’s site:
http://www.uie.com/articles/web_forms/
At the conference, he mentioned using left-aligned labels (i.e. distancing the label from the form field) as a way of purposefully slowing down the user if, for example, the form required them to input some sensitive information and you wanted them to slow down to think (i.e. not mindlessly autocomplete the web form). I also found his addressing the primary and secondary purposes of buttons at the end, and even went back to my own forms to change “Cancel” buttons to smaller cancel text links next to the primary “Submit” or “Finish” button.
It’s rare when I can walk away from a conference session with some actionable items, so I’m really looking forward to his book, Web Form Design Best Practices, due out March 2008.
Add comment January 14th, 2008