A List Apart

Issue № 314

It's all about your form.

Testing Accordion Forms

by Luke Wroblewski ∙ 28 Comments

Web forms let people complete important tasks on your site; web form design details can have a big impact on how successful, efficient, and happy with the process they are—especially details like form length. Enter accordion forms, which dynamically hide and reveal sections of related questions as people complete the form, allowing them to focus on what matters and finish quickly. How do your smallest design decisions affect completion speed? Which design choices make these innovative forms feel familiar and easy? Which choices make them feel foreign and complex, leading people to make errors?

Forward Thinking Form Validation

by Ryan Seddon ∙ 38 Comments

When users complete a form to buy your product or sign up for your service, you want to reduce mistakes and guide them to success. Now, with HTML5 form input types and attributes, you can set validation constraints to check user input. With CSS3’s new UI pseudo-classes, you can style validation states to make form completion quick and effortless.

More from A List Apart

Columnists

Rachel Andrew on the Business of Web Dev

You Can’t Do Everything

In any given day I can find myself reading up on a new W3C proposal, fixing an issue with our tax return, coding an add-on for our product, writing a conference presentation, building a server, creating a video tutorial, and doing front end development for one of our sites. Without clients dictating my workload I’m in the enviable position of being able to choose where to focus my efforts. However, I can’t physically do everything.

From the Blog

Paul Irish on Chrome Moving to Blink

The dust has begun to settle after Google’s announcement that Chrome would soon be using their own divergent fork of WebKit as a rendering engine. Now that things have calmed down a bit, I’ve asked Paul Irish to share some of the Chrome team’s plans for the near future.