Forms can be found on almost every website; from contact or feedback forms in small websites to bank details in commerce websites, from registration to communication, from banking to searching.
What we wanted to do, and why we wanted to do it
At cxpartners, we have designed and tested numerous new and existing forms for websites from different companies. We use a set of golden rules that we use as a reference for form design that we have developed over the past six years.
We wanted to validate these rules and seek further insights into various aspects of web form design. This lead us to carry out an eye-tracking study to observe how people react to different form designs, and to find out where users look when they are presented with a big list of text boxes.
We also wanted to find out how we can optimise our layouts when designing a form, to ensure users understand what they have to fill in and ensure users focus on their primary task(s) when filling in a form.
Lastly, we want to provide a list of form design guidelines with supportive data that can help us, and other designers design a better forms.
By Chui Chui Tan, April 27 2009