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Monday, February 14, 2005

Friendly forms

Last week, the dutch website Naar Voren (a site similar to A List Apart, but in dutch) published an article of which I was a co-author: Fout! - Haalt je bezoeker de eindstreep.

The article is about writing a friendly form that can deal well with errors, and guides the user to the finish line. Also, it highlights the importance of friendly error messages and of keeping forms limited to the information that's really needed. My part in the article mainly was the PHP script.

Anyway, I've put up a translated demo and the accompanying code here on this website. Maybe someone finds it interesting.

Posted by karma at 21:00:23. Filed under: Other Programming

Comments

I think these types of forms should also be used inside Nucleus. With comment forms, mailforms, and inside the admin area (settings/profile).

It's much more informative compared to the standard error, and inside Nucleus it would provide a seamless experience when submitting data.

Posted by Roel at Tuesday, February 15, 2005 13:57:17

Very nice, that's the way errors should be handled online. Make the user feel like they are running an app on their own machine.

Posted by hcgtv at Tuesday, February 15, 2005 17:42:10

Nucleus 3.2 will contain a step in that direction: error messages for comments are no longer displayed on a separate page, but next to the commentform itself.

Highlighting improperly filled out fields is not in there yet. Main problem there is probably the templating. There's quite a bit of extra sugar required to surround invalid fields.

Posted by karma at Tuesday, February 15, 2005 18:26:43

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