Form design tips

As I discussed in my post on del.icio.us last week, sometimes the rush to create an innovative new tool or technique results in some of the fundamentals of good usability design being glossed over. Tried and true methods aren’t sexy… unless they have eye-tracking images! Luke Wroblewski has put together a very informative column on the placement of form submission buttons. If that sounds like an extremely boring topic to you, you’re probably right. However, if you’ve ever clicked on a “Reset” button accidentally, then you can appreciate that there are people thinking abut such issues. The included quantitative and qualitative data are frosting on the cake.

After browsing through his site a bit, I was also fortunate enough to stumble onto a PDF presentation summing up a number of form design best practices. It’s 112 slides, 3.9 MB and not particularly verbose, but if you learn visually, it’s a great package.