The Duality of Forms
Tuesday June 27, 2006 / 1 CommentsI’ve recently realized that there’s only 2 types of forms. There are forms you use very often, and forms you only use occassionally. For instance, with a blogging tool, you’ll use the form to write posts much more often than you’ll use the forms for editing your templates. (On second thought, as often as some people redesign, that might not be the case.) For argument’s sake, we’ll just write them off as exceptions.
I realize this isn’t ground-breaking news for anyone, but the implications are interesting. The frequency with which a particular form will be used should influence how it is designed. For instance, with Basecamp, the message posting screen, which is used frequently, is kept to a bare minimum with little visual clutter or instructions.
However, the project settings screen has extensive instructional text to help guide you. Of course, some of the differences lie in their purposes, but the point is that it’s safe to create longer forms with additional text in certain circumstances. The challenge simply lies in recognizing when to go in depth and when to keep it simple.
It’s not uncommon to be concerned about creating long and complex forms. However, in some situations it makes sense to add the additional text and complexity because the form is used so infrequently. Everytime someone visits it, they probably haven’t used it in a while and may have forgotten how it works. Give them reminders and save them time.
For frequently used forms though, the opposite is usually true. You want to design a form with little visual clutter and as little instructional text as possible. Sometimes this means putting more thought into the design of the form, labeling, relationships between fields, or even the length of the form. Of course, another good option is to hide fields that aren’t used every time, and let people choose to expand those options on the occasion that they are needed.
Basecamp does an excellent job of this on the message posting screen. Given that you probably won’t be attaching files every time you post a message, they wisely collapse that section by default. If you do want to upload a file, it’s only a click away. This helps keep things simple for 80% of the time without making it too complex for the other 20%.
Summary
This is just something I’ve been mulling over as I start working more and more on my own application. While it’s easier to maintain forms that all look exactly the same and use consistent styling, it’s also valuable to know when a form needs to be different and custom-designed to smoothly support its own very specific needs.
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“I’ve recently realized that there’s only 2 types of forms. There are forms you use very often, and forms you only use occassionally.”
I disagree. I think there are 3 types of forms; forms that you use very often, forms that you use frequently, and forms that you use occassionally.
It’s important that we make this distinction and clarify the issue so that we can architect those pages appropriately. Otherwise, we might end up making a “frequent” form that is of an “occassional” difficulty level; or worse, an “occassional” form as easy to use as a “very often” form.
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