Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Jessica Enders

Jessica Enders — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 11:11:34 GMT

Hello Afshan
Thank you for your great article. It’s really nice to see such a comprehensive, clearly written article on good forms design in such a popular and well respected publication.
I’d like to comment on your discussion with Richard Dalton regarding the metaphor. I agree that we shouldn’t feel the need to replicate the paper forms experience when collecting information on the Web.
Personally, I think one of the most helpful metaphors is that of the conversation: a good form is a tool for having a conversation with someone, in order to gather data from them, which in turn allows you to provide a service or good. There are lots of different types of successful conversations; some of the ways they differ include the context, language skills and level of familiarity between the two parties, to name but a few.
You and your readers might be interested to know that there’s an international association for those interested in forms design. It’s called Business and Forms Management Association (BFMA) and offers a great forms design mailing list called Formspace (the links are http://bfma.org/index.php and http://www.bfma.org/formspace/main.htm respectively). You don’t have to be a member of BFMA to access Formspace and it is a great place to get answers to forms design questions from a global group of experienced professionals.
I also plan to regularly publish articles on different forms design topics on the website of my new business, Formulate Information Design (http://www.formluate.com.au). To date I have put up a couple about measuring the concept of importance, and next up is an article on the best way to collect names in forms.

Jessica Enders — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 11:25:07 GMT

Hi Afshan
Apologies for the typo in my web address, which is actually http://www.formulate.com.au/.
Ripul intimates a good point about form length versus ease-of-use. Many people are focused on making a form as short as possible (in paper as well as electronically). I argue that what’s more important is making the form-filling experience as straightforward and painless as possible. Often this can mean that the form is physically larger, because you’re including things like contextual help.
There is some research out there to support this view. I haven’t got a reference on hand but I remember reading a paper some years back that showed users didn’t necessarily care about the number of pages in a paper form. There are also studies around that show the importance of /perceived/ time instead of /actual/ time, and how the two can be quite different. If filling out the form is a pleasant experience, perceived time may be less, even though we’ve increased it in size to improve usability.

Jessica Enders — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 23:59:54 GMT

Hi Andrew

Just wanted to say that I thought this was a very balanced, well-written article, posing some very carefully thought-out and interesting arguments. Thank you!

Jessica Enders — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 09:07:27 GMT

Hi Vivek

Thanks for an interesting article.

Search is not an area of expertise so forgive me if this is a dumb comment. I think it’s great that you’ve recognised that matches may not be found because of typographical mistakes and the like. However, shouldn’t a good search algorithm look for and return close alternatives (i.e. use fuzzy logic) when searching for matches? By this I mean that if someone searches on Tim Campbell, then Tim C should come up as a match anyway – albeit one with not as much relevance as a full match – because the “Tim”s match and the “C” matches?

Your alias approach could then supplement the in-built flexibility to continually improve search results over time.

Regards,
Jessica Enders
Principal, Formulate Information Design
http://formulate.com.au