Forms and Usability
While trying to come up with a good alternative for styling the forms for a client’s directory site, I was poking around for inspiration and found this excellent article about Label Placement in Forms, which uses eyetracking studies to determine which form element and label arrangement is the most advantageous and least strain on the user.
Forms that are designed to be easier to use will encourage people to actually use them instead of surfing away from them. The best arrangement is for the label to be left aligned in a normal weight font immediately above the text field, with a bit of whitespace below the text field to separate it from the next. Second best is for the label to be on the same line as the text field and to the left of it, but to have the label be right aligned and the text field to be left aligned, which allows for the easiest eye tracking when they’re on the same line, since the end of the label abuts the text field and allows it to very easily be identified as belonging to it.
Now I just have to figure out which will work best for all these forms . . .
[tags]Styling Forms, Form Usability, Form Design[/tags]
March 25th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Heh. Wow. Here I’ve been doing the “right way” all along when possible, simply because it’s what’s always looked “best” to me….
That’s an extremely interesting study. Actually, all the eyetracking ones are food for thought.