Designing Interfaces, 3rd Edition

Chapter 10. Getting Input from Users: Forms and Controls

Sooner or later, the software you design will probably need to collect information from people. It might even happen in the first few minutes of interaction. What’s your login name? What words do you want to search for? Where should we ship your order?

In this chapter, we look at a number of topics related to getting input from users:

• Guidelines for designing useful, usable forms

• Different forms for different purposes

• Developing effective autocompletion

• Designing complicated controls

Form interactions seem to be easy to design at first. This is for several reasons. Everyone is familiar with the standard form elements such as text fields, checkboxes, and combo boxes. We have more than two decades of interactive form design examples to choose from. These input controls are also a big part of the user interface (UI) frameworks we will review in Chapter 11. All of these interface toolkits have form elements and controls ready to go, out of the box.

However, you might stuggle with a design that is awkward, difficult for users to understand, or difficult to complete. Here’s another sample question that can shed light on the kinds of problems designers need to think about in designing forms and controls: for what location do you want a weather report? The user might wonder, do I specify a location by neighborhood, city, region, state, country, postal code, or what? Are abbreviations OK? What if I misspell it? What if ...