Web forms design guidelines: an eyetracking study | Hacker News Reader

Web forms design guidelines: an eyetracking study

cxpartners.co.uk

55 pointsnreece11 comments

I think that the most brilliant idea in the article is that of not using asterisks to indicate required fields. Instead put the word "Optional" in the field and have it clear when the user clicks on the field. (Screenshots in the article)

That is a very elegant and simple solution.

It's my gut feeling that asterisks are so commonly used to indicate required fields that most users have come to understand their meaning. Nevertheless I also like the "optional indicator in the field" idea, and I also agree with the advice in the article to only ask for required fields. In other words, if a field is optional, give strong consideration to omitting it from the form entirely.

If a field is optional, give strong consideration to omitting it from the form entirely.

I totally agree. In that case less is more. You want users to go through a sign up form quickly and be able to get started. You can always provide a settings panel on the other side for adding extra, optional information.

By keeping those fields off the signup form you make things easy and fast for new users.

I understand the meaning, but somehow I still don't always see them. I still frequently get complained at by webforms for not filling stuff in.

So again; this solution is awesome.

These are some helpful conclusions, but I'm not sure how much they can be trusted. The article says they tested with eight participants, each participant filling in two of the four forms. That's a pretty small amount of data to make recommendations on.

From 2000 (gasp), here's an article from Jacob Nielsen on why you only need to test with 5 users: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html

More recently, here's a related article on Multiple-user Simultaneous Testing, when and why you'd test with more people and how to actually do that: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/multiple-user-testing.html

Some in Academia have debunked that testing with 5 is enough... See http://uxexchange.com/questions/328/ideal-number-of-candidat...

I'd love to find an eye-tracker and play with it to see what it is I tend to look at. Anyone have any experience?

Chui Chui loves food, and is very fond of sugared squid!

Good to know!

Yeah, I have this thing called a "visual cortex" which provides me with instant feedback on what I'm looking at. If you don't have one, get one! It's incredibly useful.

this is a really good study, its nice to have someone sit and think really hard about those seemingly trivial decisions that can really affect a sites usability, like not using asteriks for required fields.

The way to establish "guidelines" IMO is to prove what works the best with A/B testing.

The article provides interesting ideas, but little value in real world application as ultimate business value from form design guidelines should = form completion.

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