Discover the principles behind building great forms. Design for multiple devices, gather the right information, create balanced layouts, design effective user flow and much more to increase conversion and take the guesswork out of the design process.

Designing UX: Forms

Preface

Introduction

General project management techniques apply when working on forms as much as any other web venture. There’s a raft of information available on such techniques, and in all likelihood your organization or team have already selected what works well for them. 

Form Projects

This chapter is all about the words you use in your forms. They’re the most influential component of your design—more so than how your form looks.

Words

Forms have many elements in addition to words, like actual fields and buttons. In this chapter, we’ll look at the best way to visually design these elements—what they should look like, and where they should go. For simplicity, we’ll refer to this as layout .

Layout

Paper forms are static. Immobile, unresponsive, fixed. Forms come alive when they’re on the web: questions can appear or hide, errors can be flagged and corrected, and the experience can be tailored to users and their needs. 

Flow

Even if your team is using an agile or lean approach, forms are complex yet so influential that they need some documentation. Otherwise, you’ll have people asking you, a year from now, why one question isn’t included and another is asked the way it is.

Community Questions