This article was originally published in the Oct 2008 issue (Vol 13, No. 4)

About the Author

Sherri Martin is a freelance emedia project manager. Currently, she is heavily involved with PopSci.com, the online presence for Popular Science magazine

STC UUX Community Newsletter
Usability Interface

Designing Forms That Work: A Talk With Caroline Jarrett

By Sherri Martin, Editor

Designing a usable form requires more than slapping together some fields and putting them in front of the user. Just ask Caroline Jarrett, an expert in the usability of forms. Her curriculum vitae includes prominent speaker at conferences of the STC and UPA, usability consultant, founder and principal at Effortmark, and now author: Forms That Work, which she co-wrote with Gerry Gaffney.

Forms are more prevalent in web design than you may think: from simple login and newsletter subscription forms to lengthier registration and even tax forms. I spoke to Ms. Jarrett spoke about her career and the characteristics of a well-designed form.

You have made a career of consulting on how to design usable forms. How did you get started, and what do you consider common problems with forms?

It was by accident actually. I was doing some project management on a Rank Xerox project for the European Patent Office. We were using optical character recognition (OCR) to scan patents and I became familiar with OCR. Then I got a job delivering OCR to the Inland Revenue, the UK tax authority, in 1992, and of course there are a lot of forms in taxes.

The biggest problem is the intrinsic "formness" of them. People hate tax forms at the conceptual level. Before the form comes out of the envelope, they hate it. It's intrusive, and requires effort to complete. The next problem is when forms ask you questions you don't know how to answer. They also are just generally ugly.

What are the characteristics of a well-designed form?

You have to work on the relationship, conversation, and appearance. A good form helps the user to achieve something, that's relationship. For example, if you're ordering something, you expect to give a shipping address. Then the conversation: a good form asks questions that users can answer easily. Then appearance: it's better if the form looks tidy. Users don't want forms to be fancy. They just want them to be usable.

Why is the relationship between a user and an organization so important to designing well-designed forms?

When you ask someone to fill in a form, you change the way they are interacting with your website. You've gone from sending out information to making the user divulge information. People are very sensitive to the amount of effort it takes, privacy issues, about looking after their identities. At the very basic level, typing requires more effort than clicking. You have to think about whether the effort you are asking someone to put in is worth it.

How does a company establish trust with its users?

It is a bit harsh to expect a poor little form to make your whole organization trustworthy. Credibility has to be looked at in the overall context. What is the purpose of the site? What is the user's purpose for visiting the site? Is there any connection in those two goals?

How do people tasked with creating a form get their organization's buy-in for the time and effort to create a form properly?

In my experience it's really tough. That's part of why we put a "messy but typical" forms process in the book, as well as an orderly process where you work from beginning to end. Messy is what happens in real life. You create your form in the margins of other work. In my consulting process, it's often an iterative process. The first time you have to twist arms for usability testing. The second time they think maybe if we'd done this the first time, it would be easier. Over time, the process proves itself.

Once a good form is created, can the organization forget about it? When should an organization revisit the usability of the form?

It's a continual process. It's like anything else on the web- a process of attrition. You write something and create something and it's good. Inexplicably over time it deteriorates. Little changes get made and over time the whole thing deteriorates. I don't have a good answer for when to revisit. Try to keep on top of day-to-day usability and from time-to-time have a real revisit. People don't bother too much about little forms, like a login form. It's pretty predictable: it has a username and password. If you give it a little dusting now and then it's fine. Then there may be a larger form that you may say, "it's good enough for now," then let people get used to it to see what the real issues are and maybe come back to it in a year or so.

With something as a tax form, you probably have to let it run for 5 years because people have to write software around it and do training around it. It affects so many people. It's best to leave it for a little while (barring the lawyers and so on) and make changes in batches.

What can readers expect to learn from your book?

Our ambition for the book is really to give people who work with forms some ways of thinking about the problem. There are guidelines in form design, but so often guidelines end up being unsatisfactory because they aren't applicable to your situation. People think "you've talked about tax or business forms, but my form is about a game. How does this apply to me?" We tried to give people a way to think through the situation, so they have ways to work through the design process and apply it to their specific problem.

Forms That Work is the companion book to Letting Go of the Words by Ginny Redish. We have used the concept of illustrating examples with happy and sad faces, so that when people open these books, they know what point an author is making about a picture.

It is quite a thin book: we were keen to bring it in under 200 pages. You can pick it up and maybe read it in an afternoon. We tried to be conscious of how much time people want to invest in this topic.

What did you learn while writing Forms That Work?

Writing books is really hard work! We started the book quite a while ago. The web has moved on, our ideas have moved on. All sorts of things have happened in that time. One thing I really learned is the people who comment on your books and discuss it with you are invaluable to that process. I cannot emphasize how important it is to find people to help you and listen to their advice. People want to help you and are unbelievably generous with their time.