(via Coudal)

10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design

• What task is the user trying to complete?
• Is the form long or short?
• Are there default values for any of the fields?
• What data is essential to completing the form? What is not essential?
• How will headers and sub headers be treated?
• Will entry formatting or completion tips need to be incorporated?
• How will error messages be handled?
• How will required vs. optional fields be indicated?
• How will primary and second action buttons be treated?
• How much time do I have before the user bails?
• What happens after the form is submitted?

While designing a form doesn’t sound exciting, it is one of the most important aspect of web design. Designers usually want to focus attention on making the home page sexy. But as explained in this article, The $300 million Button, the placement of a button can literally cost or make you hundreds of millions of dollars.

Amazingly, there is not much written about web form design. The best resource I’ve found is Luke Wroblewski’s book, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks. He gives some very thoughtful insights on forms and users.

I’ve been looking around for some inspiration, but have come up empty-handed. Everyone is using either tables, grids,  lists or tiles to display large numbers of records. In some cases, I’ve seen these views combined with some success, but these are just hybrids of the same old tired methods. Maybe there isn’t another way? Maybe these are the only ways humans can comprehend data. Or could there be a smell-o-vision spreadsheet in our future? There are 5 senses damn it. Let’s use them all.

I will pray to any God(s) who will release me from my table hell!

Case in point. This morning I went to Facebook and started posting comments on photos of a friend’s nice baby. I wrote something like “Are you sure you want to do this baby thing? Maybe adoption is the answer”. Not very nice, but she would expect that from me. After laughing to myself,  I started surfing around and noticed a few strangers amongst by friends. Then came the “You stupid idiot! You are logged into your wife’s account.” I should have noticed the tiny 110× 200px image of myself sandwiched between the left navigation and “what on your mind?” box or by my name in 8pt font in the upper right hand corner. Thanks a lot Facebook.

I get why Facebook did this. They want individuals to easily see and interact with their other. However, by removing individual from the center, the user is without an anchor, lost in a crowd of friends.