Collecting user’s data through a website is a major objective of an enterprise. No matter how beautiful design your website possesses or what sort of UI is being reflected, it is very crucial to gather information of the user as they are useful for implementing business strategies and development. And for that reason, designing an attractive ‘Form’ becomes essential in order to let user bother your website.
In modern design strategies, a lot of focus is on material design seeing the numerous design application of a website on smartphones, desktops and variety of other electronic devices. And that is why the ‘Form Design’ might be a challenging task for the designers.
This article shall familiarize you with some basic concepts of form structures and designs for modern websites.
Guidelines For Structure:-
- The very first thing to consider is the type of information you seek from the user. Having known the requirements of the form design based on the information, pen down the basic design layout that is common for app and the website
- As you begin, style all the controls in form with same label
- Place brief text info or in-line place holder to the form controls as it assists user to be more specific with the information they provide.
- In case, you provide more columns vertically, avoid extending the width of the rows.
- Do not enable auto keyboard as it forces user to feed in their data which might be disliked by some of the users.
When you are working on the design of the forms, the best way to evaluate it is by thinking yourself as the user and perform relevance check. Also, compare it with your idea that you want users to fill up the form.
Single Column Layout Requirement:-
- When you want user to follow a specific order.
- When Form requires multiple pages
- When you are designing for app that has tall narrow layout
- Sometimes, you can use single column layout when your form lies in some specific corner or utilises less space
Two Column Layout Requirement:-
- These are appropriate for designs requiring short forms with limited vertical panning
- Avoid using forms when there is extensive vertical panning on the page
Three or More Layout Requirement:-
- This is suitable for landscape page orientation in order to make best use of space
- Mostly suited for fixed horizontal panning and not for long vertical panning
Placement Of Labels:-
- The best idea is to place labels on the top but in case of vertical panning, it can also be placed to the left of the form control for a better space management
- Use uniform style for label placement throughout the form
Form designing is very significant from the accessibility point of view. A good form design can fetch a lot of data to help firms monitor and plan their business. We, at Oodles Studio, take care of every minute designing technicalities and aim to provide our clients with best of their designing needs keeping website accessibility as a crucial design phase.
