Don Habas wrote: > > > Does anyone know where I can find some studies or articles that may > > help my argument?
And Jared answered: > Have you read Luke Wroblewski's Web Form Design? > http://is.gd/5riHR Yes, I have (I contributed a 'perspective' to it) and although he does touch on the question of how to split up a long form such as Don is struggling with, he deals with it in half a page and doesn't address Don's specific question. I've got a bit more detail in my book ("Forms that work: Designing web forms for usability" www.formsthatwork.com) in that the chapter 'Making the form flow easily' is mostly about the challenge of splitting up long forms. But I have to admit, it's still only 10 pages. (We were trying very hard to keep the book short). I've got a short article online ("Long forms: Scroll or tab?" http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2352.asp) So now to some real advice. In the book, we mention a result from usability testing which is that users don't like it when the page suddenly changes on them. For example, you're typing along answering what looks like (say) a series of 10 questions. You stick in the answer to question 2, and bingo the darned computer suddenly changes the page to throw another three or four questions at you. Not a pleasant experience. I'll go along with your convention of calling the questions like question 2 'parent questions' and the ones that appear according to your answer 'reflexive questions'. So if you want to go with the 'expand the page' option, I recommend that you include some sort of button or other indicator to show the user that question 2 has this possibility built in. Example: in the UK, the standard method of obtaining a user's address is to ask for postcode and then expand the page to deal with the address. This works very nicely if the box for getting postcode then has a button next to it called 'look up address' or something like that. Clicking the button says to the computer 'do something for me now' and sets the user up to expect some extra questions. This may or may not be possible to do on your form: you'll have to look at the wordings for the parent questions and the reflexive questions to see whether you can write the appropriate commands. Another approach, which we call 'pre-build', is to ask the parent questions on one page (one of the approaches that you're considering) and then build pages of reflexive questions. This can work quite nicely, given good explanations, and especially if its used in tandem with what we call a 'summary menu' i.e. a mini-menu that allows users to fill in the pages in whatever order they wish and to track their progress on the different pages. I think this is evidence in your favour in your discussion. (Summary menus are a good idea for any long or complex form, as users are likely to require more than one session to complete them). So all of this was a long way of saying: it depends on the specifics of the questions, the writing around them, and the details of the implementation. It might help you to convince your underwriters if you can persuade them to divulge exactly why they are asking the different questions so that you can then explain those reasons to the users rather than just firing a long, complex, and apparently random series of questions at them. Hope this helps 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
