I agree with Caroline on the need for UIs to exercise sufficient restraint when people are entering data.
When designing interactions on web pages, I often refer to a little guy I keep in my head, who's a concierge in a high-class hotel, and imagine how he'd behave. A great concierge, maitre d', or waiter etc. doesn't trouble you for too much information. If they need a signature, it's made as easy as possible. Imagine if there's a mistake. They don't peer over your shoulder as you sign your credit card chitty in a restaurant. They give you a pen, and stand back giving you time to fill in the data. If there's a mistake, they'll wait an appropriate length of time and then more than likely apologise themselves for the mistake. If you were in a posh restaurant and the waiter was watching the pen as you totted up the tip, and jumped with "Actually, it's $15.90" in as soon as you wrote the wrong digit, you'd just feel hassled. Surely it's no different online. - Ben (Caroline wrote) I've watched users working with forms like this. My concern is that they pretty much all (no matter how web-savvy) seem to jerk away from the screen in surprise as the ordinarily docile page suddenly starts changing on them before they've even typed anything much in the field. This worries me. For years, I've been advocating doing validations as soon as you can, but there seems to be something 'too soon' about interrupting the user's typing process to warn them about an error. It seems particularly bad on Mint.com - can't type a whole email address before it starts barking at me. So my current advice is to refrain from interrupting the conversation in this way. Let the user complete their entry as they naturally would, and only seize back control of the page when they've returned control to you. For example, by clicking on something else. ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
