Last week, I had a meeting with two devs and two designers. The meeting’s purpose was to let developers raise problems and get quick design decisions. One of the devs brought up an issue with a form that had conditional radio buttons. Here’s what the screen looked like (it’s a bit different to what I’m actually working on but close enough): When the user selects “Yes” it reveals a field to enter the name: If you leave it blank and submit the form, the page refreshes and shows an error: So far...
29 days ago • 2 min read
Quick one: Yesterday I sent you an email “My response to Hacker news comments”. I received a few responses asking for clarification in my second illustration – because I screwed it up. Here’s what it should have been: Enjoy,Adam
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Last Tuesday, my article about whether to use “Your” or “My” in user interfaces went viral on Hacker News. In case you don’t know, Hacker News is a site where people discuss and upvote ideas in tech and design. The gist of my article said to use “Your” when communicating to the user, like this: And to use “My” when the user is communicating to us, like this: I read through all the comments on Hacker News and picked my top 5 worth responding to (as each one has a useful design takeaway):...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
This is a question that comes up frequently when designing interfaces: Should you use “your” or “my” when referring to things in a user interface? For example, should you use: “My account” or “Your account”? “My orders” or “Your orders”? “My cases” or “Your cases”? It’s actually a trick question, because often you don’t need any prefix and can just use: Account Orders Cases Amazon is a good example of this in action because it’s obvious that it’s your account and your orders: But what if your...
2 months ago • 2 min read
The launch for Form Design Mastery 2.0 ends in a few hours – I wanted to use this final email to give you a design tip. Here goes: My friend Rachael (a product manager) once said to me: “People love the comfort of a number because they think that data = facts. But it doesn’t tell you if that number is good or bad. You need research for that.” Like I said to Rachael: Yep! Sadly, a lot of designers love the comfort of a number. A simple metric that they can use to tell themselves they’ve done a...
3 months ago • 2 min read
This is Marcos. He’s a lead designer and one of my original Form Design Mastery students. When I met him he was already experienced and knew a lot about form UX. So why invest in my course? He said he struggled to convince his colleagues and stakeholders to listen to him. He was fed up with having endless discussions with designers who focus 99% on aesthetics, ignoring what’s most important for good UX. I totally get it… I’ve failed countless times to get my team to stop following the latest...
3 months ago • 1 min read
In 2008 I worked on a redesign of the checkout flow for Boots.com. We had the RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People) do an accessibility audit. The consultant found a lot of problems but the main one I remember was with form validation. She said: It’s not clear that there are errors (even though we were showing a big red list of errors at the top of the page) The error messages are disconnected from the inputs (even though the errors were close to the form) The errors were hard to...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Last week I revealed the first law of form design which is that: Nobody wants to use your form. Like I said this is crucial to know because it emphasises respecting the user over trying to make your form fun, engaging, novel or “on brand”. And showing respect means doing everything we possibly can to get that form out of the way as quickly as possible. One way to measure how well we’re doing that is by tracking completion time. Which leads us to the second law of form design: Completion Time...
3 months ago • 2 min read
This is Joe: He’s a senior interaction designer who works for a large digital consultancy in London. And he’s spent the last few years designing complex products and services for GOV.UK. Before he signed up to Form Design Mastery he told me that he lacked clarity in: simplifying complex form flows making design decisions without research working with developers to make interactions accessible I get it. Because when I first started making forms, they seemed so simple on the face of it. But as...
3 months ago • 2 min read