Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability clearly explains exactly how to design great forms for the web. The book provides proven and practical advice that will help you avoid pitfalls, and produce forms that are aesthetically pleasing, efficient and cost-effective. It features invaluable design methods, tips, and tricks to help ensure accurate data and satisfied customers. It includes dozens of examples - from nitty-gritty details (label alignment, mandatory fields) to visual designs (creating good grids, use of color). This book isn't just about colons and choosing the right widgets. It's about the whole process of making good forms, which has a lot more to do with making sure you're asking the right questions in a way that your users can answer than it does with whether you use a drop-down list or radio buttons. In an easy-to-read format with lots of examples, the authors present their three-layer model - relationship, conversation, appearance. You need all three for a successful form - a form that looks good, flows well, asks the right questions in the right way, and, most important of all, gets people to fill it out. Liberally illustrated with full-color examples, this book guides readers on how to define requirements, how to write questions that users will understand and want to answer, and how to deal with instructions, progress indicators and errors. This book is essential reading for HCI professionals, web designers, software developers, user interface designers, HCI academics and students, market research professionals, and financial professionals.

Whether you are a professional new to the user-centered design field, or an experienced designer who needs to learn the fundamentals of user interface design and evaluation, this book can lead the way.
What will you get from this book? Based on a course from the Open University, UK which has been taught to over a thousand professionals and students, this book presents an overview of the field. It illustrates the benefits of a user-centered approach to the design of software, computer systems, and web sites, and provides a clear and practical discussion of requirements gathering; developing interaction design from user requirements; and user interface evaluation. The book's coverage includes established HCI topics for example, visibility, affordance, feedback, metaphors, mental models, and the like combined with practical guidelines for contemporary designs and current trends, which makes for a winning combination. You get a clear presentation of ideas, illustrations of concepts, using real-world applications.
This book will help you develop all the skills necessary for iterative user-centered design, and provides a firm foundation for user interface design and evaluation on which to build.
* Co-published by the Open University, UK.
* Covers the design of graphical user interfaces, web sites, and interfaces for embedded systems.
* Full color production, with activities, projects, hundreds of illustrations, and industrial applications.
* A supporting web site includes sample exam paper, numerous activities to practice the concepts learned, and a set of review questions to test your own learning plus web resources."