Nathanael Boehm on web user experience design, the Internet, social networking & free wireless

Posted by Nathanael Boehm on August 4th, 2008 in General, User Experience, Web Design & Standards

Just a few more things I thought of since my write-up on Jessica Enders’ recent presentation at the Canberra Web Standards Group inspired by seeing some bad examples of form design over the last few weeks.

User verification

Many sites will require you to verify you “own” an email address - a process which really doesn’t verify ownership or authenticate the user at all as what it really does is see if you have access to that email account - but anyway, it’s the best mechanism we’ve got for now. But I’ve seen many examples of good or at least average form design that fall down simply because no thought has gone into what happens after the user hits “Register”. I’ve trialled hundreds of web applications and services … and I don’t have time to wait 24 hours for an account verification email - I’ll have lost interest by then. Also the design of those emails is usually dismal … and I admit in the past I’ve been guilty of creating really crappy email templates for automated system emails.

It’s all part of the form so put as much thought into that as the rest of the web visual component of the form. End-to-end process.

Pulling the rug from under me

This is one that always gets a “ARGH!” out of me. A form should help guide the user and where possible automatically complete fields, filter options and suggest probable responses.

But what annoys me is when you fill out a section of the form and then your selection on the last option goes and changes field contents and sometimes even the form layout and range of options for fields you’ve already filled in! Don’t do that! It’s like having a “Copy from billing address” shortcut at the end of the mailing address form so the user doesn’t see it until it’s too late - but worse than that. It’s disorienting, means having to read back up the page, verifying input and re-selecting options.

Sometimes it can be a matter of re-ordering the fields so such dynamic changes only affect fields that the user hasn’t completed yet and sometimes it’s a matter of not trying to be so clever with the form.

And I still believe that typing in the name of your country of residence is faster than selecting it from a drop-down list of 195 countries - but anyway, it looks like that one is here to stay.

Tags: design, fields, forms, html, input, ui, User Experience