Wonderful, practical insights on creating forms for your web site

books:

	• Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability (Interactive Technologies) Caroline Jarrett, Gerry Gaffney Morgan Kaufmann, 2008 - 199 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Very practical, great book

Jarrett and Gaffney have written a very practical book for people who design forms. They've limited their examples to Web forms, but the principles they are espousing apply as well to forms on other systems, and to paper forms up to and including the tax forms we all know and love, whatever country we call home.

The authors take us from considerations of the relationship between the form and its filler to "the truth" about planning a form for success in a number of different languages. Sometimes it's too early to ask the user to give you a credit card number. And some languages will require you to lay out the form in a different order, so leaving extra room for longer field titles might not be enough.

This book is staying on my "consult" shelf next to my desk. I expect to look at it often.

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Wonderful, practical insights on creating forms for your web site

Your web site probably includes forms, and you want those forms to be easy for people to fill out so that you get reliable, accurate information. You need this book.

Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney give you excellent, practical advice on how to plan and develop forms that work. Their model of "relationship, conversation, appearance" helps you understand not only how but also why following their guidelines will make your web forms successful. In less than 200 colorful, easy-to-read pages with a wide variety of examples, you'll get all you need to design useful, usable forms. Get this book!

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Comprehensive demystification for forms on the web

The web design world has been lacking in a books focusing on forms for a long time, then along come two: "Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability" and Luke Wroblewski's Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. Both books are truly good but if you had to choose just one, I would recommend "Forms that Work", for two reasons.

Firstly, while Wroblewski comes from a general web interface design perspective, Jarrett has a forms background. This is important because as anyone who's read texts like Asking Questions: The Definitive Guide to Questionnaire Design -- For Market Research, Political Polls, and Social and Health Questionnaires and Measurement Errors in Surveys (Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics) will know, the exercise of collecting quality data is not a trivial one. In my opinion, someone with data collection expertise can apply that to the web medium more easily and effectively than someone with expertise in the web medium can learn the complexities of collecting data.

Secondly, in addition to specific advice about key aspects of a form's design, "Forms that Work" gives clear overall models for thinking about forms. These models enable the reader to make informed design decisions for cases beyond those covered in the book. This makes "Forms that Work" so much more than a reference.

Add to this the fact that "Forms that Work" is written in a conversational tone, has loads of real life examples (of both what to do and what not to do) and goes into just the right amount of detail, and you've got a extremely valuable resource for anyone who has to design forms for the web.

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The best book on form design

This is an excellent resource for all aspects of form design. Not only does it cover all the key aspects, it thoroughly explains the reasons for each of the recommendations. The recommendations also detail the more subtle aspects of form design, something that I haven't found in any other book.

A must have for anyone who designs forms.

Their advice is excellent, well researched, and based on extensive experience. It has certainly made it much easier to design usable forms, and justifying your designs.

Thank you.

reviews: page 1, 2

Forms are everywhere on the web - for registration and communicating, for commerce and government. Good forms make for happier customers, better data, and reduced support costs. Bad forms fill your organization's databases with inaccuracies and duplicates and can cause loss of potential consumers.

Designing good forms is trickier than people think. Jarrett and Gaffney come to the rescue with Designing Forms that Work, clearly explaining exactly how to design great forms for the web. Liberally illustrated with full-color examples, it guides readers on how to define requirements, how to write questions that users will understand and want to answer, and how to deal with instructions, progress indicators and errors.

*Provides proven and practical advice that will help you avoid pitfalls, and produce forms that are aesthetically pleasing, efficient and cost-effective.

*Features invaluable design methods, tips, and tricks to help ensure accurate data and satisfied customers.

*Includes dozens of examples -- from nitty-gritty details (label alignment, mandatory fields) to visual designs (creating good grids, use of color).

*Foreword by Steve Krug, author of the best selling Don't Make Me Think!

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