Book Reviews: “Web Form Design Filling in the Blanks”

Posted by uidesigner on Feb 4th, 2009 | 0 comments

I highly recommend Luke Wroblewski’s book “Web Form Design Filling in the Blanks.” I first came across this book many months back and since then it has retained a coveted spot on my reference shelf.

An interesting thing happened the other day that made me think of this book. Cue flashback!

The other day I was looking at a registration form built for a development group and it was quite possibly the worst form in the world. It was one continous line of form elements strung together.  It was way too obvious that the forms creator only cared about function. It was  at that moment I was thinking just how much I would like to undo this crime against web design humanity and mail this Dr Frankenstein a copy of this book. Hell even one page of the book would have provided this “coder” with a semblance of design knowledge.

I can't belive somoene released this!

In the book Luke explores real world application implementations and illustrates how a simple design change in a form can mean the difference between success or failure. The part I liked best about this book is it’s numerous examples. Inside it covers in some shape or fashion all of the following:  form errors, required fields, layout, form element grouping, and accessibility issues.

A Word About The Book

 After hearing Luke speak at a few events I was immediately excited to read this book. I know what you are thinking it’s a book on forms. How could it get any more boring? Well, this is quite to the contrary. The book has a very light tone and tosses in lots of interesting case studies. For example one study focuses on the different variants of button elements. Should they be colored? Perhaps they should be different shapes? Should the primary function standout from the secondary? 

Believe it or not there are a ton of things to think about when designing a form. I recommend you grab a copy of this book. Even if you choose not to read it all the way through having it around for a reference is a smart thing to do.

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