Caroline Jarrett - Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability

Forms that Work

The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies

Series Editors:

Stuart Card, PARC;

Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft;

Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group

Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics
Tom Tullis and Bill Albert

Moderating Usability Tests: Principles and Practices for Interacting

Joseph Dumas and Beth Loring

Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management

William Jones

GUI Bloopers 2.0: Common User Interface Design Donts and Dos

Jeff Johnson

Visual Thinking for Design

Colin Ware

User-Centered Design Stories: Real-World UCD Case Studies

Carol Righi and Janice James

Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design

Bill Buxton

Text Entry Systems: Mobility, Accessibility, Universality

Scott MacKenzie and Kumiko Tanaka-ishi

Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works

Janice (Ginny) Redish

Personas and User Archetypes: A Field Guide for Interaction Designers

Jonathan Pruitt and Tamara Adlin

Cost-Justifying Usability

Edited by Randolph Bias and Deborah Mayhew

User Interface Design and Evaluation

Debbie Stone, Caroline Jarrett, Mark Woodroffe, and Shailey Minocha

Rapid Contextual Design

Karen Holtzblatt, Jessamyn Burns Wendell, and Shelley Wood

Voice Interaction Design: Crafting the New Conversational Speech Systems

Randy Allen Harris

Understanding Users: A Practical Guide to User Requirements: Methods, Tools, and Techniques

Catherine Courage and Kathy Baxter

The Web Application Design Handbook: Best Practices for Web-Based Software

Susan Fowler and Victor Stanwick

The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phones Impact on Society

Richard Ling

Information Visualization: Perception for Design, 2nd Edition

Colin Ware

Interaction Design for Complex Problem Solving: Developing Useful and Usable Software

Barbara Mirel

The Craft of Information Visualization: Readings and Reflections

Written and edited by Ben Bederson and Ben Shneiderman

HCI Models, Theories, and Frameworks: Towards a Multidisciplinary Science

Edited by John M. Carroll

Web Bloopers: 60 Common Web Design Mistakes, and How to Avoid Them

Jeff Johnson

Observing the User Experience: A Practitioners Guide to User Research

Mike Kuniavsky

Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces

Carolyn Snyder

Forms that Work

Designing Web Forms for Usability

Caroline Jarrett

Gerry Gaffney

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In the beginningdozens of years agoresearch papers crawled out of the primordial ooze somewhere in Switzerland to form the World Wide Web.

People in university basements posted the papers, and people in other university basements around the world could read them. Read-only.

Then one day someone in one of the basements thought, Wait. Why couldnt the people who read these things send us information, too? And thus < form > < /form > was born.

And although no one knew it at the time, e-commerce was born, too, because as Caroline and Gerry explain in the pages youre about to read, forms enable a conversation between Web publisher and Web user. It was such a powerful and useful idea that theres hardly a site today that doesnt have a formor dozens of forms.

And since weve all used forms all of our lives, we know just how unpleasant bad forms can be:

Forms that ask questions you dont know how to answer

Forms with multiple-choice questions that dont have the choice you want

Forms that ask for too much information, or information youd rather not give

Forms with huge quantities of confusing instructions

and on and on.

In an ordinary conversation, we work these things out by asking for and offering clarifications (Do you mean my average income lately, or for my whole life? How many children do I have, or how many are living at home?). But since a form can only ask the questions we tell it to ask, in exactly the way we tell it to ask them, a good form has to be completely clear and completely self-explanatory. Thats where this book comes in.

Its not just that I like her personally (although she is, as wed say over here, a really good egg); its that shes one of the handful of people whose opinions about usability I always want to hear.

And Ive always thought of her as