Here's the foreword I wrote for Caroline Jarrett's definitive book on creating usable Web forms, Forms that Work.

There's a lot more info about the book, related articles, etc., etc. on the book Web site.

If your site includes any forms (and whose doesn't?) you should read this book.

Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability
by Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney

List price: $49.95   
Amazon price: $44.95  

Foreword

In the beginning--dozens of years ago--research papers crawled out of the primordial ooze somewhere in Switzerland to form the World Wide Web.

People in university basements posted the papers, and people in other university basements around the world could read them. Read-only.

Then one day someone in one of the basements thought, “Wait. Why couldn’t the people who read these things send us information, too?”  And thus <form> </form> was born.

And although no one knew it at the time, e-commerce was born, too, because as Caroline and Gerry explain in the pages you’re about to read, forms enable a conversation between Web publisher and Web user. It was such a powerful and useful idea that there’s hardly a site today that doesn’t have a form...or dozens of forms.

And since we’ve all used forms all of our lives¹, we know just how unpleasant bad forms can be:

• Forms that ask questions you don’t know how to answer

• Forms with multiple-choice questions that don’t have the choice you want

• Forms that ask for too much information, or information you’d rather not give

• Forms with huge quantities of confusing instructions

...and on and on.

In an ordinary conversation, we work these things out by asking for and offering clarifications (“Do you mean my average income lately, or for my whole life?” “How many children do I have, or how many are living at home?”). But since a form can only ask the questions we tell it to ask, in exactly the way we tell it to ask them, a good form has to be completely clear and completely self-explanatory. That’s where this book comes in.

I’ve known Caroline Jarrett for a long time, and she’s always been one of my favorite people in this usability racket.²  It’s not just that I like her personally (although she is, as we’d say over here, a really good egg); it’s that she’s one of the handful of people whose opinions about usability I always want to hear.

And I’ve always thought of her as the Web forms expert--someone who can talk for an hour about whether to use colons at the end of labels and make it interesting (although she’d insist that it’s not, except to people like her who are obsessed with forms).

But this book isn’t just about colons and choosing the right widgets. It’s about the whole process of making good forms, which has a lot more to do with making sure you’re asking the right questions in a way that your users can answer than it does with whether you use a drop-down list or radio buttons.

Like a conversation with Caroline, this book she and Gerry have done gets to the heart of the matter. It’s long on practical advice, extremely generous in sharing their vast experience, and full of exactly the advice you need.

I’m lucky. When I have a question about forms, I can just check to see if Caroline has Skype on, or send her an email. Now you’re almost as lucky: you've got the next best thing in your hands.

Steve Krug
Brookline, Massachusetts
April 2008

© 1997-2009 Steve Krug