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Web Form Design Patterns: Sign-Up Forms, Part 2

By Smashing Editorial, July 8th, 2008 in How-To | 124 Comments

Last week we have presented first findings of our web forms survey. The main objective of the survey was to provide designers and developers with some intuition of how effective web forms are designed; we also presented some guidelines of how an effective and user-friendly web form can be achieved.

We have focused on sign-up forms as we wanted to consider further crucial forms (e.g. checkout forms) separately. Afterwards we've gone through each and every one sign-up form of the selected sites and analyzed the design approaches implemented in these forms. Below we present the second part of our findings — the results of our survey among web-forms of 100 popular web-sites where web-forms (should) matter.

Please notice that this post is not about checkout forms — that's a topic for another discussion, we may consider them separately in one of the upcoming posts. We would like to thank Wufoo for providing us with a framework to conduct our survey.

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Web Form Design Patterns: Sign-Up Forms

By Smashing Editorial, July 4th, 2008 in How-To | 204 Comments

If you want to maximize the revenue of your service you need to maximize completion rates of your web forms. Unless you have some revolutionary ideas to impress your visitors at first glance, it is not enough to simply enable users to sign up on your site. To make it possible for the service to reach a maximal exposure we, designers, need to provide users with a good user experience. We need to invite them, describe to them how the service works, explain to them why they should fill in the form and suggests the benefits they'll get in return. And, of course, we should also make it extremely easy for them to participate.

However, designing effective web forms isn't easy. And it has one simple reason: nobody likes to fill in forms — neither offline nor online. Therefore, as designers, we need to figure out sound design decisions to make the form completion easy, intuitive and painless.

But how exactly can we figure out these decisions? Where should the link to the form be placed in the layout? How should we design it? How should we highlight the labels and how should we align them? How do web form design patterns look like in modern web-sites? These were exactly the questions we've asked ourselves. And to get the answers we've conducted a survey.

Below we present findings of our survey of current web form design patterns — the results of an analysis of 100 popular web-sites where web-forms (should) matter. We have decided to start with sign-up forms first. We present the first part of our findings below; the second part of the survey results will be published next week.

Update: the second part of the survey results is now also published: Web Form Design Patterns: Sign-Up Forms Part 2.

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Web Form Design: Modern Solutions and Creative Ideas

By Smashing Editorial, April 17th, 2008 in Design Showcase | 129 Comments

Web form is often the main communication channel between visitors and site owners. Feedback is always important which is why it's necessary to make sure that web forms are easy to understand and intuitive to use. Nevertheless, even in form design one can afford some healthy portion of creativity.

Web forms don't have to be boring and, using CSS or Flash, you can easily make sure that they are appealing and effective. To get noticed, you need to come up with something unique and interesting — symbols, icons, colors, position or the size of web form are often used to achieve interesting design solutions. We've searched for some examples and we've found them. Creative, original and unusual web forms.

Below we present over 40 (really) beautiful examples of web forms as well as modern solutions and creative ideas related to web form design. Some of the examples are Flash-based; however, in most cases you can easily create similar designs with pure CSS and (X)HTML.

Also consider our previous article
- CSS-Based Forms: Modern Solutions which lists modern solutions for CSS-based form design.
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CSS-Based Forms: Modern Solutions

By Smashing Editorial, November 11th, 2006 in CSS | 326 Comments

In Web 2.0 registration and feedback forms can be found everywhere. Every start-up tries to attract visitors’ attention, so web-forms are becoming more and more important for the success of any company. In the end, exactly those web-forms are responsible for the first contact with potential customers. Let’s take a look, which modern solutions a [...]
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Design Patterns: Badges, Tag Clouds, Huge Fonts

By Smashing Editorial, September 3rd, 2006 in Graphics | 53 Comments

Web 2.0 dominates. Everywhere and all the time. The new design trends are there, in front of you and me, on the blog you’ve come from and on the blog you are going to visit next. Every now and again we find new design elements which somehow manage to become essential for every hip, trendy, [...]
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List of CSS Tools

By Smashing Editorial, September 2nd, 2006 in CSS | 141 Comments

What can be better than simple, useful and handy tools you can use "on the fly" in the development process? Whether you'd like to test font size, generate online-forms, create rollover-navigation, create a slide-show, format CSS code or optimize your code - you can use dozens of tools to make your life easier. We've collected them. At least most of them, and compiled them in a brief and precise overview. And here what we've come out with - most useful CSS-Tools you can use developing tableless web-sites.
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