Form Design - Labels

January 14th, 2008

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.

Entry Filed under: Commentary, Form Design