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). :)

Today marks the third annual World Usability Day. It is an opportunity to increase the “public’s awareness of the need to make the services and products important to human life easier to access and simpler to use.”

There are multiple events happening around the world.

In Canberra, we had a one hour lunch time seminar with different presenters speaking about various things. We had about 8-10 minutes each – I did a presentation on Accessibility and Design: a holistic approach. Other speakers included:

• Jane Robey and Kim Chatterjee from Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) – they covered their experiences of accessibility and usability in DEWR
• Neil Lynch from University of Canberra – Error prevention
• Ying Sawetrattanasatian also from University of Canberra – she gave a summary from her PhD about a Thai University’s Library Website Usability
• Tina from Australian Taxation Office – talked about her experiences as a usability professional

We even got a World Usability Day cake (pictured above) baked by Sisira Adikari’s (organiser) wife and some delicious Indian samosas!

As usability/web professionals, we sometimes (often it seems!) find ourselves in compromising situations. How do you act and what do you say if you’re asked to do something that goes against what you believe? What happens if you’re asked to analysis, design and implement a project that you feel isn’t appropriate? For internal users, what do you say to a Manager who asks to see the results of an evaluation session that you conducted on one of their staff? What do you do if the Project Manager approaches you and asks you to change your evaluation report as they don’t agree with the conclusions? Should findings from your evaluation sessions be shared within the organisation? What happens if it exposes certain parts of the organisation? Is it ok to reuse parts of recorded evaluation sessions in training sessions, or conference talks?

There are no black and white answers for all of the above (and related) situations. There are various codes of ethics and professional conducts that exist to provide some guidance on these and related issues, such as:

• Usability Professionals’ Association Code of Professional Conduct
• ACS Code of Ethics
• ACS Code of Professional Conduct and Professional Practice
• ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct

The problem in codes of ethics and conducts lies in the interpretation of the codes, and how it applied to each situation. Oliver K. Burmeister wrote an article titled HCI Professionalism: Ethical concerns in Usability Engineering (PDF, 32kb) which presents five case studies looking at various ethical issues, and the short-comings of one of the Code of Ethics. It doesn’t provide all the answers, but it does help by providing various perspectives on some common issues.

Short-comings and all, there are enough codes of ethics and conducts out there to provide guidance on how we conduct ourselves. What I would like to see is a forum where we can share these kind of issues (anonymously perhaps, to protect the privacy of the organisations and customers that we engage) and get advice and help from each other.

Potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds.

Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye

As a usability professional, it is important that we provide recommendations that are meaningful, and are not based purely upon inferences. Take the name fields on forms (i.e. do we put the first name before the surname, or vice versa?). A user may say, “I always put my first name first”. It’s easy to then infer that the first name should be before the surname. But is this true in all cases? How many users are having problems with this ordering? How about in Asian countries where the surname usually comes first?

Jared M. Spool takes a look at this issue of strong recommendations in The Road to Recommendation that looks at jumping to conclusions, validating our inferences, making strong recommendations, and (my personal favourite) that there are alternate means of analysis other than usability studies, such as analysis of web site logs. It is well worth a read!

There are some interesting articles to catch online:

• Pushing the right buttons requires a human touch from Sydney’s Morning Herald
• Usability at the core of iPod emotion from The Age

Thanks go to Patrizia Bordignon for the two links above.