1. The document discusses form design for technical specialists at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). It provides suggestions to improve label placement and clarify associations between labels and fields. 2. It notes that users primarily care about understanding questions, providing answers, and achieving their goals with the form. Form design elements may be overlooked if they do not impact these user needs. 3. The document stresses considering all users, including novices. It suggests clarifying the form purpose for new users through enhanced preamble text and references to a frequently asked questions section.

1. 1
Forms
Caroline Jarrett
Designing forms for
technical specialists
and their users

2. Background:
the European Bioinformatics Institute
In 2010, I had the opportunity to give a talk on forms at the EBI,
part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).
“ EBI provides freely available data from life science experiments, performs
basic research in computational biology and offers an extensive user
training programme, supporting researchers in academia and industry”.
A typical EBI form allows highly-trained scientists to perform difficult
tasks on complex data.
These slides present some before-and-after suggestions that
provoked lively discussion. We sometimes agreed that the original
was better.
Thanks again to EBI for a great experience. 2

3. 3
Agenda Label placement on forms
What really matters in forms design
Are all the users equally specialist?

4. 4
Reading forms is different from using them

5. Ordering
a prospectus
• User has
chosen a
prospectus
• Postcode
lookup for
the address
5

6. 6
One person’s
heat map
• Small green
dots show
narrow focus
on labels and
left end of fields
• Red crosses
show clicks

7. 7
Back to labels.
The ‘narrow focus’ means big jumps for the users’ eyes.

8. 8
Mario Penzo’s recommendation:
“Place labels above or right-align them”
Penzo, M (2006) Label Placement in Forms
http://www.uxmatters.com/MT/archives/000107.php

9. 9
Are all these questions equivalent?
Where do the answers come from?
• Your address
• Your city
• Company you work for
• Number of colleagues
• Your address
• Your city
• Company you work for
• no
of colleagues
• Name
• Surname
• Age
• City

10. 10
Easy questions and hard
questions prompt different
patterns of reading
• Users glance at
populated answers
• Users look mostly at
the left end of the
answer space for
easy questions
• Users read complex
instructions quite
carefully...
• ... provided they are on
the way to their goal

11. A design tip: make sure that the label is
unambiguously associated with the field
11
Before

12. A design tip: make sure that the label is
unambiguously associated with the field
12
After?

13. Easy questions or hard questions? For whom?
13

14. 14
Agenda Label placement on forms
What really matters in forms design
Are all the users equally specialist?

15. Users care about what they want to achieve
with the form; design can be overcome
• Most users don’t care about:
– Where the labels are positioned
– The design and placement of the required field indicator
– Whether the label has a colon on the end of it
• Most users do care about:
– Whether they understand the questions
– Whether they can answer the questions
– Whether the form will accept their answers
– What the organisation will do with their answers
15

16. The definition of usability:
who is using the product for what purpose
16
The extent to which a product can be used
by specified users to achieve specified goals
with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction
in a specified context of use
(ISO 9241:11 1998)

17. 17
Understand your users’ goals
• What does the user get out of it?
– What does the user achieve by filling in this form?
• How does the user feel about it?
– Does the user have a choice?
– Does the user trust your organisation?
• What is the user expecting?
– What does the user expect to tell you?
– What do other organisations ask the user in similar circumstances?

18. 18
Think about effectiveness, efficiency, context
• Effectiveness
– What is the user’s definition of ‘success’ with this form?
• Efficiency
– Will it be difficult to find the answers?
– How long can the user spare?
– How long will this take?
• Context
– What else is happening?
– What will happen next?
– What happened before?

19. What are the tasks for this form?
19

20. 20
Agenda Label placement on forms
What really matters in forms design
Are all the users equally specialist?

21. This form has new users as well as
experienced users
21

22. A glimpse into the FAQ
22

23. 23

24. A suggested approach to the preamble:
before
24

25. A suggested approach to the preamble:
after
25

26. A bit about me:
Caroline Jarrett
www.effortmark.co.uk
Twitter @cjforms
Jarrett and Gaffney (2008)
Forms that work:
Designing web forms
for usability
Morgan Kaufmann /
Elsevier
Stone, Jarrett, Woodroffe
and Minocha (2005)
User interface
design and
evaluation
Morgan Kaufmann /
Elsevier
26