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Functioning Form: 2008 Retrospective12.28.2008 by LukeWAs 2008 comes to a close, I present a Functioning Form anniversary special: eight of 2008's public and personal favorites. For even further nostalgia, check out my seven favorites from 2007, six favorites from 2006, five from 2005, and four favorites from 2004.  | Tags | TrackBacks: 0Event: Interaction 09 | Vancouver12.16.2008 by LukeWOn February 5-7, 2009 I'll be presenting a workshop and speaking at the Interaction 09 conference in Vancouver, BC Canada. This year's program looks great and I'm very happy to be part of it.  On Thursday, February 5th, I'll be teaching a full day workshop on Web Form Design. This workshop was the top-rated session at last year's Web App Summit and I've updated it with material on just about every aspect of form design you could imagine including: form organization, rich interactions (with Ajax), gradual engagement, global design, and lots more! Sign up to attend today and save $50 on the workshop. On Saturday, February 7th, I'll be presenting a talk titled Parti & The Design Sandwich. Official descriptions for both sessions follow: Web Form Design In the world of Web applications, forms bridge the gap between people, their information, and your product or service. From registration forms that welcome new customers to checkout forms that finalize e-commerce transactions, Web forms frequently broker crucial online interactions. In his full-day workshop, Luke Wroblewski, author of the bestselling book Web Form Design, will walk you through design considerations and best practices of form design culled from international site-tracking, usability testing, eye-tracking studies, and over eleven years of designing Web applications. He'll outline how the interaction and visual design of Web forms can make the difference between acquiring a customer and completing a transaction or not. Through presentations, discussions, and hands-on exercises, attendees will learn how different types of forms, input fields, input labels, validation, feedback, calls to action, and surrounding visual elements can support or impair different aspects of user behavior. The workshop is structured to provide attendees with an understanding of the right "best" practices for their specific context, so they can quickly go from the quintessential design answer of "it depends" (on the business goals, user needs, and context of your forms) to actionable solutions. After this workshop, you'll never look at web forms the same way again. Parti & The Design Sandwich In architecture, parti refers to the underlying concept of a building. Will it be a public structure that provides safety or a commercial building focused on customer up-selling? Design principles are the guiding light for any parti. They articulate the fundamental goals that all decisions can be measured against and thereby keep the pieces of a project moving toward an integrated whole. But design principles are not enough. Every design consideration has a set of opportunities and limitations that can either add to or detract from the parti. Designers who want to bring coherent visions to life need to learn the detailed ins and outs of design considerations so they can select the best solutions from the options available. This combination of design principles at the top and design considerations at the bottom allows interaction designers to fill in the middle with meaningful structures that enable people and organizations to interact, communicate, and get things done. In this talk, Luke Wroblewski will illustrate how the World’s most accessed Web page, yahoo.com, was redesigned with a parti and the design sandwich. Input Masks Design12.13.2008 by LukeWInput masks integrate formatting cues directly into an input field to help signal how to correctly answer a question. These formatting instructions are automatically included in an input and cannot be removed by a user. More importantly, a user cannot enter other non-valid characters into the input field. Check out the demo at Masked Input Plugin (video below). Signaling Flexible Inputs12.08.2008 by LukeWFor a while, I’ve been advocating the use of flexible inputs within Web forms. These input fields allow people to answer questions the way they want instead of the way a database requires them to.  While most designers agree this is a good thing, I often get asked how people would understand that any valid format can be entered into a flexible input field. Because many forms still enforce specific formats through adjacent help text or strict input field affordances (as illustrated in the image above), can people answer questions correctly in the absence of these signals? The short answer is yes. Despite people being “trained” to fill in forms the way computers require them to, I haven’t seen much of the hesitation and over-thinking designers fear when explicit formatting signals are not present. When no explicit formatting cues bound an input field, people tend to gravitate to their format of choice. Provided that format is a valid answer, the successful submission of the form is all the acknowledgement people need to indicate the question was answered correctly. However, if you are still concerned people “won’t get it” because they are “used to” having to employ specific formats to answer questions, you could try using a flexible input and also including a bit of help text that hints at a specific format. In this model people who read the help text and adhere to the recommended format and those who don’t can still be successful. And since many people do not read instructions on screen, you could simply think of flexible inputs as a way to mitigate error states for those who don’t read.  Check out Luke's book about Web form usability, visual design, and interaction design considerations: Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. Design Skills for Strategy: the short version12.04.2008 by LukeWHere’s an abridged version of four core design considerations that provide unique value to strategic decision-making:
Modern Web Form Design recording available12.03.2008 by LukeWA recorded version of my Modern Web Form Design webinar is now available for purchase at the Rosenfeld Media site.  The Web has been transformed by the recent proliferation of rich interactions and social applications. But the workhorses of the online world, Web forms, have been slow to evolve with these changes. As brokers of crucial online interactions like e-commerce checkout and registration, forms bridge the gap between people, their information, and your product or service. As a result, Web form design matters. But web forms aren't keeping up. Building on topics in his top-selling book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks, Luke Wroblewski will walk you through the latest applications of rich Web form interactions (made possible by dynamic technologies like Ajax) including: flexible inputs, dynamic help systems, inline validation, selection dependent inputs, and more. He'll also outline how gradual engagement approaches to form design can create compelling new user experiences for a wide variety of Web applications and services. Learn how these modern approaches to Web form design can enhance your sites! Local Market Factors that Influence Design11.30.2008 by LukeWWhile presenting our Influencing Strategy by Design workshop overseas earlier this year, Tom Chi and I compiled a short list of factors that can influence Web application design decisions in specific local markets:
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