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Forms
Caroline Jarrett
Designing forms for
technical specialists
and their users

2.
Background:
the European Bioinformatics Institute
In 2010, I had the opportunity to give a talk on forms at the EBI,
part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).
“ EBI provides freely available data from life science experiments, performs
basic research in computational biology and offers an extensive user
training programme, supporting researchers in academia and industry”.
A typical EBI form allows highly-trained scientists to perform difficult
tasks on complex data.
These slides present some before-and-after suggestions that
provoked lively discussion. We sometimes agreed that the original
was better.
Thanks again to EBI for a great experience. 2

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Agenda Label placement on forms
What really matters in forms design
Are all the users equally specialist?

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Reading forms is different from using them

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Ordering
a prospectus
• User has
chosen a
prospectus
• Postcode
lookup for
the address
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One person’s
heat map
• Small green
dots show
narrow focus
on labels and
left end of fields
• Red crosses
show clicks

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Back to labels.
The ‘narrow focus’ means big jumps for the users’ eyes.

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Mario Penzo’s recommendation:
“Place labels above or right-align them”
Penzo, M (2006) Label Placement in Forms
http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000107.php

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Are all these questions equivalent?
Where do the answers come from?
• Your address
• Your city
• Company you work for
• Number of colleagues
• Your address
• Your city
• Company you work for
• no
of colleagues
• Name
• Surname
• Age
• City

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Easy questions and hard
questions prompt different
patterns of reading
• Users glance at
populated answers
• Users look mostly at
the left end of the
answer space for
easy questions
• Users read complex
instructions quite
carefully...
• ... provided they are on
the way to their goal

11.
A design tip: make sure that the label is
unambiguously associated with the field
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Before

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A design tip: make sure that the label is
unambiguously associated with the field
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After?

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Easy questions or hard questions? For whom?
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Agenda Label placement on forms
What really matters in forms design
Are all the users equally specialist?

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Users care about what they want to achieve
with the form; design can be overcome
• Most users don’t care about:
– Where the labels are positioned
– The design and placement of the required field indicator
– Whether the label has a colon on the end of it
• Most users do care about:
– Whether they understand the questions
– Whether they can answer the questions
– Whether the form will accept their answers
– What the organisation will do with their answers
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The definition of usability:
who is using the product for what purpose
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The extent to which a product can be used
by specified users to achieve specified goals
with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction
in a specified context of use
(ISO 9241:11 1998)

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Understand your users’ goals
• What does the user get out of it?
– What does the user achieve by filling in this form?
• How does the user feel about it?
– Does the user have a choice?
– Does the user trust your organisation?
• What is the user expecting?
– What does the user expect to tell you?
– What do other organisations ask the user in similar circumstances?

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Think about effectiveness, efficiency, context
• Effectiveness
– What is the user’s definition of ‘success’ with this form?
• Efficiency
– Will it be difficult to find the answers?
– How long can the user spare?
– How long will this take?
• Context
– What else is happening?
– What will happen next?
– What happened before?

19.
What are the tasks for this form?
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Agenda Label placement on forms
What really matters in forms design
Are all the users equally specialist?

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This form has new users as well as
experienced users
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A glimpse into the FAQ
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A suggested approach to the preamble:
before
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25.
A suggested approach to the preamble:
after
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A bit about me:
Caroline Jarrett
www.effortmark.co.uk
Twitter @cjforms
Jarrett and Gaffney (2008)
Forms that work:
Designing web forms
for usability
Morgan Kaufmann /
Elsevier
Stone, Jarrett, Woodroffe
and Minocha (2005)
User interface
design and
evaluation
Morgan Kaufmann /
Elsevier
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