Eye Tracking and Forms

I just became aware of a nice eye-tracking study on website forms, using samples from Yahoo! Mail, Googlemail, Hotmail and eBay. The 10 Web form design guidelines are the result of eyetracking data captured by CXpartners, and contains subtle and practical tips. via @johnparillo via @georgesduverger

Comments

[clay]

Eye tracking ... interesting. But keyword tracking, search engine tracking and other marketing data seem more important. Check out BestContactForm.com

[Keith Lang]

Hi Clay, I'm not sure I understand. This eye-tracking data is helping build forms that people complete accurately and easily — as opposed to getting more people to try to complete them. Maybe I'm missing something?

[Jacob Wyke]

That's a great list of guidelines, thanks for sharing Keith.

I especially like #6 - Using a single field for numbers/postcodes.

I hate forms that split up data that I consider all to be one. Thankfully its been a few years since I last encountered a credit card number split into 4 different fields and experienced the confusion of looking down while I enter my number, only to look back up at the screen and see 3 empty boxes waiting for the rest of my number that I just painstakingly entered.

[Keith Lang]

Thanks Jacob. I never know what to do with the international code in these forms. Do I put in the '+' or do I not ? :-)

[Vance]

Although I enjoyed the article, I am not convinced that its results are particularly valid.

First, the testing sample was 6 women and 2 men. If a design is going to be tested with only 8 people, skewing drastically based on sex should probably be avoided.

Second, some of the design insights seem a bit amateur. For example:

"Left-aligned labels have a tidier, clear layout ..."

Words like "tidier" and "clear" are far too vague to be part of a UX designer's vocabulary. Perhaps the author meant that whitespace to the right of labels was maximized, which aided implicit grouping? We will never know.

I still think the article is worth a read, just to jumpstart design juices when creating a new form design. But I wouldn't count the results of this study as gospel.

[Keith Lang]

That's a good point Vance, it's certainly a pretty small sample group. But I do like the spirit of it. :)

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