It’s one of the absolutes of life - filling in forms are not fun for the majority of people (with the exception of Andrew Boyd who loves forms so much, that he “would do it [designing] for free”). I’m not a fan of filling in forms. Come tax time, I rather get our accountant to do our tax return than try tackling it myself. Yet many organisations seem to be very Vogon-like when it comes to forms (Vogons are the masters of bureaucratic behaviours). Every organisation seems to have a multitude of forms for every aspect of life - taking leave, applying for access to a building, security clearances (which are always deeply painful to fill in), medical insurance, house insurance, survey forms, win-an-ipod…the list goes on.
Love it or hate it, forms are part of lives. I’ve spent a few years doing user centred design work around translating paper based forms into an electronic medium, so it was a refreshing reminder at last night’s Canberra IA Cocktail Hour when Jessica Enders from Formulate Information Design took us through her presentation, Form Design. Jessica started off with a very amusing clip from Black Books which nicely demonstrated the joys (or lack of) of filling in forms.
She talked about The 4 Cs of Good Form Design:
- Clear - forms should be clear, enabling “the form-filler understanding, with minimal effort, what to do with the form as the designer intended.”
- Concise - it’s about being efficient and being only as long as needed (not necessarily being as short as possible, which brings about its own usability and accessibility problems).
- Clever - forms should reduce the workload upon the user. Don’t make users go through all of the questions if they’re not relevant. This is a lot easier to achieve with electronic forms but can also be done with paper forms (think of the directional instructions you get on some forms, such as “if no, go to question 6″).
- Contextual - provide enough context and don’t make people guess at the meaning of words. Jessica gave an example about a survey she was recently completing that asked for her annual income - is that income before or after tax? Let people know why they have to complete the question. I’ve noticed the why behaviour in many of my user testing sessions. The participants wanted to know why they were completing certain questions. Once we put in succinct explanatory text about the why, we found that the participants were a lot more comfortable with providing the information being asked for.
Jessica also took us through her “4 layers of a form”. These were:
- Questions and answers - the “meat” of the form.
- Flow of information - she suggests mapping out the flow of questions to see at a glance the relationship between questions and impacts if questions were to be moved or removed.
- Layout - this is about the layout of elements on the page, visual hierarchy and “page furniture” (repeating elements like logo, header and footer).
- Process - a holistic view of the form filling in process.
Edit: Updated reference to Andrew Boyd and his love for designing forms (rather than the filling in of forms). :)
A belated happy new year to all of you! I’ve been battling a bacterial infection while I’m on holidays, which hasn’t been fun.
My friends Donna, Andrew and Matt recently tagged me for the ‘8 things you don’t know about me’ meme. The rules are pretty straight forward:
- Link to your tagger and post these rules
- List EIGHT random facts about yourself
- Tag EIGHT people at the end of your post and list their names
- Let them know they’ve been tagged
So here’s eight random facts about me:
- I’m a covert rubberstamper. I have a fairly large range of rubberstamps, mostly arty styled stamps, and a nice range of interesting papers. I love the different textures of paper and love to mix and match stamps to papers. You may end up getting a hand made creation from me (but only if I know your birthday!).
- I was born in Singapore and spent 8 years growing up there. My family and I migrated to Perth, Australia in the 1980s - a period when people were scared of the “Asianisation” of Australia. It was an interesting experience growing up in Australia. For a long time, I tried to deny my Asian roots after being told many times “to go back to where I came from”. I’m now totally comfortable with all sides of my heritage and am a strong believer in living in a negative-discrimination-free society.
- I love quirky hand crafted pieces of art.
- I play the djembe. I don’t play it particularly well, but I love it.
- I used to be a pretty severe stutterer, as were my dad and my uncles. I used to get really frustrated at not being able to verbally express myself clearly. I knew what I wanted to say but could not voice what was in my head. It was even more frustrating seeing other people get frustrated at me. I managed to overcome this issue by sheer force of will (both my parents and I were unaware that there were various treatment plans available to help overcome stuttering). Although I don’t stutter nowadays, there are times when I get close to it but the problem manifests in being unable to pronounce certain words in certain conditions.
- I saw snow for the first time in 2003. Prior to that, I didn’t even realise that we had snow in Australia! Ever since 2003 we’ve been hitting the ski slopes every season.
- I actually get grumpy at times. Just ask my hubby.
- I love retro tin robots. I like robots in general and have always had a fascination with them. At one stage, I thought I was going to grow up to be a roboticist.
I tag the following folks as I’m interested in finding out more about them!
- Sarah Isaacson - I met Sarah briefly at a Web Directions conference. She’s the creator of the Twitter Wordpress Sidebar Widget plus she’s just a lovely person!
- Lisa Herrod - I know she’s already been tagged by Donna, but she’s being tagged again :)
- Kenji Walter - I’ve only met Kenji recently, at the Canberra Web Blast
- Minnie - she’s a wonderful artist, writer and photographer.
- Gary Barber - I first met Gary at one of the earlier Web Directions conference. I was so excited at meeting a fellow Perth person all the way on the other side of Australia.
- My dear friend Caronne
- Ben Ryan - he’s oh so witty and his dry sense of humour makes me laugh.
- Karen Cheng who writes Snippets of Life - I’ve been following her blog towards the later part of 2007 and I love her writing style.