Column: Good Questions

Here’s a topic that divides UX professionals from ordinary people: label placement in forms. UX professionals get all excited about it, and I plead guilty to joining the discussion. I’ve written about it, included it in my book Forms That Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability, and given many talks on label placement. But conversations with my non-UX friends—maybe the retired teacher, the bookseller, or the waitress—that touch on this topic, go something like this:

Friend: “What are you talking about at the next conference?”

Me: “Label placement in forms.”

Friend: “People care about that? Really?” Read More

Here are my basic best practices for buttons:

1. Make buttons look like buttons.
2. Put buttons where users can find them.
3. Make the most important button look like it’s the most important one.
4. Put buttons in a sensible order.
5. Label buttons with what they do.
6. If users don’t want to do something, don’t have a button for it.
7. Make it harder to find destructive buttons.

Nothing particularly revolutionary there, right? Ever since the <button> tag arrived in HTML4, buttons haven’t been especially difficult to create. Despite this, it’s rather easy to find buttons that don’t comply with these basic best practices, so I’m going to dig into them a little deeper in this column. Read More

Recently, I received the good news that one of my columns is in the UXmatters All-Time Top 25: “Don’t Put Hints Inside Text Boxes in Web Forms.” That was an unusual article for me because I came straight out and said, “Don’t.” Not “it depends”—just “don’t.” And it generated a lot of discussion—none of which changed my views.

So, I’m going to do it again and say, “Don’t put labels inside text boxes.” Well, okay, what I’m actually going to say is, “Don’t put labels inside text boxes—unless you’re Luke Wroblewski.”

And now, I think I’d better explain what I mean. Read More