Luke W.'s deep dive book on web form design tradeoffs and best practices

Just finished reading through Luke W.’s great resource on web form design, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks.

It’s a great overview, deep dive, and a must read for any UX/Web DesignerFront End Developer who’s interested in serving the user and building in quality efficiencies into a web form experience.

I loved the thoroughness, questions, and “Best Practices” takeaways at the end of each chapter. Allowing the reader to walk through the pros and cons and end up with a usable checklist to consider with most design tradeoffs.

A great primer I use with my UX Design class is his quick overview of top, left, right aligned form labels Web Application Form Design UIE article. And a presentation overview for a deeper view.

A good read and one I hope has seeped into my general UX design practices – even if I have to grab it off the shelf here and there [Bonus is the PDF digital version from Rosenfield - great resources and model!]

Class One // Summer 2008

The first class was sandwiched between the XHTML/CSS section and the ActionScript sections and I focused on creating a User Centered Design report which outlined primary user groups with personas and scenarios, standards and accessible design best practices, search engine optimization (SEO), and finally some form of hueristic analysis or testing to provide for the “client” all wrapped up in a report for recommended next steps.

That worked very well to review some of the primary concepts and implementations of effective web design and the students feedback was that it was interesting, practical, and many implemented the practices in their work immediately.

Class Two // Fall 2008

We decided to move my section to the front of the class schedule to provide solid reasoning and design choices for the XHTML/CSS sites and ActionsScript work to follow. This was good, but I needed to scramble to get things shuffled around to provide more documentation (Sitemap, Wireframes) support along with the above concepts. It was a lot to cover, but again, the student feedback was positive as they felt empowered to make stronger design and interaction decisions in their work.

Class Three // Coming Up… Winter 2009

I’m looking to step back and hit primary elements of User Centered Design while giving an overview of the full design and developement process. Every company I have worked with has wrestled with finding a solid process solution and it’s exciting to try to tackle that in my own work and in presenting options to a class.

I’m thinking of using a shorter time of overview with sections on tools mentoring and class roundtable.

More on that soon…

For future posts:

1. Two classes completed teaching User Centered Design at RMCAD
2. Job change from defining, designing, and documenting Flash animated brand marketing solutions in with Xylem Digital to Flex-based, rich internet applications with Universal Mind.

More to come…

1. Introduction to “User Experience”
2. Usability Evaluation & Testing
3. User Centered Design
4. Standards & Accessibility
5. Search Engine Optimization