This list of posts and articles on better forms is organised around the themes that may form part of a topic map. See the post on creating a topic map: Discussing a topic map for how to design better a form
1. Get the questions
- Read the legislation
- Decide on measures of success. This post on Online forms: saving work or causing stress, has a useful section suggesting a range of measures for success.
- Understand needs and goals: The question protocol and People before pixels – what to think about before you start
- Observe people using the forms
- Find out how you’ll use the answers
2. Write the questions/write good questions
- Here’s some general advice on effective writing for the web: Write clearly: how to take your writing for the web to the next level
- Remember same thing/same name; different thing/different name
- Use words that users understand
- This presentation deals with language and design: Usable forms
- Avoid double-barrelled questions
- Label the button with what it does: Labels and buttons on forms and other time-consuming controversies
- Put the questions on the page
- Start with one thing per page. See: No more accordions: how to choose a form structure
- Provide a sense of control: Don’t put labels inside text boxes
- Choose the right UI components. These articles and presentations offer advice on writing instructions, labels, error messages, answer options, pre-filled fields and buttons: Eye-tracking in user experience design of forms and surveys, Design tips for complex forms, and Basic best practice for buttons
- Kill your select boxes/avoid drop downs
- Start your paper form design ahead of the digital equivalent
3. Do usability testing
- Observe colleagues dealing with the forms to understand their workflow
- Do card sorting with users to understand which questions go together
- Test at every stage: Seven questions about user research panels, How to look at the content in a form and this post which looks at an expert review of variations on a form and their results – Making a better web form
4. Follow these principles
- Do the hard work to make it simple
- For discussion of some general form design principles see Designing forms that work and Hooray, I’m doing the forms. This post, UX of transactions, has a wide-ranging discussions on making forms useful and usable.
- Make it easy for users to do the right thing. This is an early but still relevant explanation of the three-layer model and what it means in practice: Making web forms easy to fill in
- If you don’t know what you’ll do with the answer, don’t ask the question
- Make use of information that you already have