Column: Good Questions

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

Census years are exciting times for the forms enthusiast. They’re quite rare—most countries run their census at 10-year intervals. And they affect the entire population. That’s the definition of a census—a count of an entire population.

Census forms also present lots of lovely forms challenges. A census might be the ultimately complex form: it’s got lots of stakeholders, it takes years to plan, it has to work for absolutely everyone, and it usually includes a lot of relatively invasive questions. The US 2000 Census form was one of the shorter ones, at only four printed pages.

Relax! You’re not in for a dissertation about the history, theory, realities, and everything else about a census. Instead, I’m going to concentrate on one rather small aspect of a census: the envelopes. Why? Because they’ll inspire some general questions that are worth thinking about when you’re designing any complex form. Read More

If you’ve ever had your computer give you a readability score or a grade level for something you’ve written, you’ve run a readability formula. Readability formulas are easy to use and give you a number. This combination makes them seductive. But a number isn’t useful if it isn’t reliable, valid, or helpful.

In this article, we’ll explain how readability formulas work and give you seven reasons why you shouldn’t use them. We’ll also show you better ways to learn whether the people you want to reach can find, understand, and use your content. Read More