Making the Web Work: Designing Effective Web Applications

Designing Forms: Thinking in Terms of the Whole

Remember the chapter about structural models and the discussion about views and forms? When designing the structural model, the focus is on the flow of the site as a whole and how various types of pages contribute to that flow. After determining that a particular workflow requires a form, however, the challenge of the details still remains.

At the highest level, forms are essentially a mechanism for the application to ask the user questions: “When would you like to fly?,” “What is your address?,” and so forth. By contrast, views are essentially a mechanism for the user to do the asking: “What is the balance of my account?,” “What do you have in the housewares department?,” and so on.

As we ...