Primary & Secondary Actions
Luke Wroblewski recently posted an interesting article on the design of Web Forms: Primary & Secondary Actions in Web Forms. He analyses the eye tracking results from study participants as they filled out several forms with different button placements.
I find it interesting that the fastest completion results favour the option which could cause the greatest havoc: both Submit and Cancel are styled the same. But I was a little disappointed to find that Luke didn’t test a couple scenarios I personally favour and I think one of his test cases (D with the buttons far to the right) is a little unfair.
First, I would have like to see Luke test button order. In all tests, Submit appears before Cancel. From a completeness standpoint, I’d like to know whether this order makes any difference.
Second, test D features right aligned buttons while other tests have had left aligned buttons. But test D unfairly places the buttons outside the right hand edge of the form. This may be partly responsible for test subjects poor performance on the test D form.
Finally, it would be nice to see whether button styling would have mitigated performance penalties of the test D style form.
It’s great to see Luke diving into these issues. Too many Web sites have just atrocious forms and I’d love to see them improve. With a book targeted explicitly at these issues, there’s hope for improvement.