To make matters worse the map that I got when checking in wasn't new enough to include the recently built Red (Vermelha) line. But after some confusion I arrived at FIL - Feira Internacional De Lisboa.
After registration I took place in one of the auditoriums for the first session
Caroline Jarrett - Label placements in forms
Twitter: #cjforms Book: Forms that work Slides: Label placement in forms
People who didn't sign up for other workshops asked me later if it really was possible to fill 3 hours just talking about forms and 'yes' it is entirely possible.
A lot of stuff that she spoke about were old news to me but I was interesting to hear about her research. Here is a compilation of my notes:
- Just as with all other applications forms must be tailored to suit the audience you are designing for (scientific calculations v.s. a simple sign up).
- Forms are susceptible to "lost in translation" mistakes but general form design holds true across cultures.
- Don't begin a form with the hardest questions that way the user has some momentum when she encounters them and due the the effort invested is more likely to fill them in.
- Don't put a lot of space between the label and the form field itself. It makes it much harder to fill in (it made me think about the Apple Human Interface guidelines).
- It is debatable if questions above the form field or left aligned next to the field makes much difference for short questions. For longer questions is makes much more sense to put the question on top due to alignment issues.
- Highlighting the background of a label and the adjoining field helps the user keep track of her status.
- Make sure that short forms are above the fold, especially the submit button.
- Use "any reasonably harmonious arrangement and then test it"
- People quite often confuse hints for default values. I asked her about the wording of the hints mattered but she had not yet tested it.
- The symbol for mandatory is less important to users and quite often stupid to add in the first place. Why are you asking for it if it isn't mandatory? In the few cases where options aren't applicable point out that they are optional instead. If you are going to use some sort of indicator don't put it to the right of the form field.
- Having the labels inside the form fields can make sense for applications where space is limited like on a phone but mostly it just confuses people.
- Inline forms like the sign-up form on HuffDuffer seems to confuse people as well (it reminded me of the English exams back in school where I quite often would miss seeing one of the gaps and therefore miss a point).
- For English sentence case or not doesn't seem to matter for labels (but it would just be plain weird with title case in Swedish or Dutch).
- The use of colour so long as it doesn't cause visual strain also doesn't seem to matter much.
- Don't use links for action (thank you)!
- Be aware of false ends (don't put pages without input in the middle of a multi-page form).
Kristoffer Dyrkorn (Bekk) - Designing search
Twitter: #kristofd
Kristoffer's presentation was about improving the search paradigm that we are all familiar with. He showed us prototype work on a pearl growing-like search concept which drew inspiration from Google similiar and like.com. Using a set of "pearl parameters" the object being search for would emerge from the sea of less interesting stuff.
Sami Niemelä (Nordkapp) - Designing agile interactions
Twitter: #samin
Sami held a presentation about the importance of Sprint 0 in agile projects to clarify vision, lay down base work and initial planning. My most important take-away was the necessity to have planning run 2 sprints ahead of the development sprint and the ux work 1 sprint ahead.
Bill Scott - Designing with patterns
Twitter: #billwscott Book: Forms that work Slides: Designing web interfaces
Bill's presentation was absolutely the one that I looked forward to the most the first day. He has a lengthy career behind him beginning with game programming for the Mac back in 1985. After listening to his talk with Jared Spool on UIE brain sparks I became clear that I had to sign up for his presentation. Funnily enough he spoke more about anti-patterns than patterns. Here are my notes from the presentation:
- A pattern is a stylized way to capture the solution to a recurring problem (then he went on to talk about Christopher Alexander which I hope any self proclaimed UX practitioner is familiar with).
- He talked briefly about the history of design patterns in HCI and Jennifer Tidwell (excellent book but a bit dated by now).
- He compared the need for patterns to the Joshua tree principle (the importance of being able to name things). Anti-patterns are useful for the same reason.
- Interesting moments is a concept for making sure that every state of an interaction is described. It is basically the same as a tipped over decision table that with the state of the controls in the action space (I too used decision tables for interaction design specifications when working at Knowledge Values).
- Bill explained his six design principles:
- 1. Make it direct - in the words of Alan Cooper "where there is input let there be output": don't introduce needless modes in your user interface. Bill used Flickr as an example of an interface that doesn't require the user to go into a separate editing mode to change properties of an image (I'm sure VIM users beg to differ). Pitfalls are the artificial construct, tiny target and mouse trap anti-patterns (list of anti-patterns).
- 2. Keep it light weight - Make the content become interactive without resorting to needless and bloated animations and transitions. He talked about the hover and cover anti-pattern where an element would hide another element on hover and the double duty anti-pattern where a control would match to more than one action.
- 3. Stay on the page - Don't break the flow with forcing the user to go through a bunch of pages in trying to accomplish her task. A result of this is users pogo-sticking back and forth (as Jared Spool would later point out, pogo-sticking will increase the risk of a user dropping out). Bill also talked about breaking the flow with what Alan Cooper calls "idiot boxes" (dialogues).
- 4. Provide an invitation - Recognition rather than recall: give the user good memory cues that there is extra content available through e.g. dog ears or invitations on hover.
- 5. Use transitions - Transitions make the UI sizzle more but they can also be a major annoyance. Bill talked about the "cheesiness rule": Take whatever animation you made and then cut it's expose time in half otherwise the interface will quickly look cheesy.
- 6. React immediately - Be as immediate as possible, react immediately on the users request and provide an indication of the request being processed if it's not possible.
- I asked about Hoekman Jr's statement about design patterns not being enough and Bill said that it was basically the same thing but on a higher level. He seemed to be hesitant to say anything negative about Hoekman's statement though.
The day ended with drinks at the brewery where beer was served in giant towers.
No comments:
Post a Comment