Jennifer asked <snip - background on the forms she's working on> > What this makes me think of is something I'm continually being asked > by my manager and stakeholders, "Do you have any documented best > practices on X?" And, though I find tons of awesome articles by all > you wonderful people here, what is really desired is a 'checklist' > of best practices.
I'm going to interpret this as "Why did you write a book (and a bunch of articles) instead of the checklist of best practices that we actually need?" And now I'm going to brood on an answer: I don't have a problem with checklists. Mine might run something like this: 1. Find out what your users want to do 2. Establish the relative importance to them of filling in the form compared to what they want to do 3. Find out what your organisation actually does with each data item you collect 4. For every item you ask for, think very hard whether the value to your organisation outweighs the risk of losing a user who doesn't want to give it to you. 5. Write questions that are easy to answer 6. Create a flow that puts questions into a logical order 7. Think hard about whether your validation will encourage correct completion, or will simply force a user into giving you the wrong answer 8. Make it look good 9. Run loads of usability tests, and make use of the findings. 10. If in doubt about what to do, see item 9 and repeat as often as you can. First possible problem: I think that the type of checklist some people want (probably not you) is a lot more trivial than that and contains advice like "put the labels above the fields". Or maybe "put the labels to the left of the fields". The trouble with bits of advice like that is that users don't care all that much where the labels go, but they do really, really care about what they're being asked and the context they are being asked it in. Items 1 and 2 on my list, but things that have to be thought about rather than issued as instructions. Second possible problem: the checklist tends to require a follow-up here and there. For example: What exactly are questions that are easy to answer? What does answering a question actually mean? So why did I write a book? Hmm, a moment of madness, maybe? But also because I thought it might help people to have a short overview of the topic from beginning to end. And we did keep it to under 200 pages. Should I have written a checklist instead? Probably. I've written this email in about 10 minutes and it took 10 years of anguish to write the book. Only, maybe I was only able to write a 10-item checklist *because* of the 10 years of anguish - and the several years before that of thinking about the problems. Maybe the checklist doesn't work for you either... Anyway. Hope this helps. Best Caroline Jarrett www.formsthatwork.com ________________________________________________________________ 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
