Forms – Bad Habits & Basic Enhancements
Up your form game and stop frustrating your users. Cut out those bad habits and make simple enhancements to your web forms to please the user.
I’ve put together this series of articles to share some of the lessons I’ve learned over my years in web design and development.
Introduction
I’ve spent a lot of my career working in agile teams where quick turnaround and quick results outweigh perfection. Phrases like “Done not perfect“, “Get it released and we’ll come back to it” and “iterate iterate iterate” were not unheard of.
While this leads to a better product and faster releases it’s not uncommon to never “come back to it” and never make it perfect. Ultimately the user is the one who pays when you take a shortcut you never correct.
Forms are boring. No one enjoys creating a form from scratch. I bet when a form is part of a project it’s more than likely an important part – one that probably needs a decent amount of UX focus.
By illuminating these bad habits and promoting some basic enhancements your next form will be both “done” and pretty damn close to “perfect”.
Series
Future articles
I add to this series when a bad habit annoys me enough to write it up – validation and stupidly long forms are both on the list. If you want to know when the next one lands, follow the RSS feed.
