Primary & Secondary Actions in Web Forms

[Chad Nantais]

Luke Wroblewski on the placement of buttons/links in forms and how
different approaches fail/succeed, based on eyetracking studies.

http://www.lukew.com/resources/articles/PSactions.asp

[Stephan Wehner]

Luke writes in his article,

>> While the primary goal of most Web form designs is to get people
through a form as quickly and painlessly as possible, there are
situations where slowing people down is advisable. When choosing
between primary and secondary actions, visual distinctions are a
useful method for helping people make good choices.

I found that quite remarkable; it occurs, he is suggesting that the
goal of form design is to primarily allow users to enter their
information correctly, and then, only secondarily, quickly and
painlessly. Usually one takes the correctness-requirement for granted.
But here he finds it enters the picture.So it might be good to
document the full list of requirements for form-design. Has it been
done?

I also found it remarkable that "slowing people down" looks like a
very difficult task. How much control would the designer have over
users?

I'm not sure about the size of his test population, stated at 23
people. Is it big enough to allow extrapolating to millions and
millions of web users? Have these 23 people been chosen at random, or
are they in some way representative, representative of what kind of
web users?

What if next month, Apple releases a research study, performed on
2,000 people, carefully picked to represent 100 different categories
of web users. The study comes to just the opposite conclusion of
Luke's. In the mean time, hundreds of developers have followed Luke's
advice.

Stephan

--
Stephan Wehner

-> http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
-> http://www.thrackle.org
-> http://www.buckmaster.ca
-> http://www.trafficlife.com
-> http://stephansmap.org