If you haven’t yet read it, this article called The $300 Million Button is well worth your five minutes. It’s by Jared M. Spool and posted on the User Interface Engineering Web site. I don’t want to give away the secret of the article, but it discusses a very common practice on e-commerce sites, and how it tests with end users.
Archives For html forms
One of the sessions I attended at the 2008 Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco was Creating Attractive, Usable, and Accessible Forms, presented by Rob Huddleston. I went to this session as part of my current drive to improve my user interface (UI) and Web accessibility skills. In this post I’ve collected a few do’s and dont’s that I jotted down during Huddleston’s presentation. As was the case for me, you’ll likely already know some of these, some might serve as reminders of something you already knew, and hopefully a couple will make you think about rewriting some of your HTML forms today. Continue Reading…
One of the sessions I attended at the 2008 Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco was Web Application Development: The Error of Our Ways, presented by Robert Hoekman, Jr.. I went to this session in particular as part of my current drive to improve my user interface (UI) and Web accessibility skills. In the session, Hoekman mentioned the concept of poka-yoke, a Japanese term that means fool-proofing or mistake-proofing (see the Wikipedia entry). Continue Reading…
A reader named Max posted a suggestion in my book forums that I include a checklist of final steps to take before a Web site goes live (read his post). I don’t know if it’ll make it into a book but it’s a good idea so I thought I’d give it its due here. In this first post I’ll discuss general steps to take, regardless of the technologies being used. In a separate post, I’ll discuss PHP and MySQL specific steps; later, I’ll post for a Ruby on a Rails site.
Once you’ve finalized all the functionality and appearance of a site (or thought you have, at least), you should… Continue Reading…
One important topic in PHP is how to know when to handle a form’s submission. If you have two pages–page.html and handle_page.php–the assumption is that whenever handle_page.php is accessed, it’s handling a form. This may not always be true, but is a reasonable enough assumption. However, more commonly the same page is used to both display and handle an HTML form. In such situations, that page is being accessed twice: once when the form is loaded and a second time when the form is submitted back to this same form. The trick is being able to identify which stage the page is in. Continue Reading…
