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Receiving user input via forms is a fundamental part of many web applications (and indeed desktop based systems too) so it is vitally important that they are as user friendly as possible. In this post I’ll present some short paragraphs for improving form usability.

Use HTML tables to layout your forms
Don’t mind what the standards web guru says about using CSS instead of HTML tables. The reality of the situation is that HTML tables are the most suitable method to layout your forms in a user friendly manner (without a serious amount of work anyhow). The most common layout is the standard two column approach. This approach sees the labels for the various input elements in the left column and then the input elements themselves in the right column.

Display error messages on the form itself
Unless space absolutely prohibits it you should display any error messages associated with user input on the actual form page itself as opposed to using a popup Javascript alert box. The problem with alert boxes is that a user must click them away to continue filling in the form. When the error alert box is gone from view so too is the useful error messages which it contained, this means that the user must now work from memory when trying to fix input errors. The ideal situation is not only to have error messages on the form itself but to have the individual errors appear next to the associated input elements.

Use a progress indicator for forms spanning multiple pages
Including some kind of progress indicator on your form improves the user experience as users like to know where they are in any form filling process, this is particularly true if an activity requires multiple forms to get all the data it needs. An example of this could be booking an airline ticket or making a hotel reservation which typically require three or four screens to complete. Implementing a progress indicator for your form could be easy as altering your form navigation button text from something like ‘Next’ or ‘Proceed’ to ‘Go to Step 2 (of 4)’ or ‘Proceed to Step 2 (of 4)’. Alternatively you could create a dedicated header or sidebar table to illustrate progress in a more defined manner.

Micellanous
Micellanous items include using the tabindex property to define the correct logical ordering of textboxes, dropdowns etc. so the user can quickly pass the focus to the next input element, setting the default focus of a form to the element a user would normally expect to fill in first, defining access keys for keyboard access to fields. Additionally remember to go easy on CAPTCHA elements designed to stop spam bots as you will find they often stop legitimate users too.

Obviously the above information is not an in depth look at form usability, however the web has a tonne of information about this very important topic. One favourite article of mine which covers the topic of form layout (dealt with briefly above) is called Web Application Form Design and is written by Luke Wroblewski. Incidentally Luke is expected to release his web form design dedicated book in early 2008. As far as I’m aware this will be the only publication on the market dealing specifically with web form design and usability. Based on the quality of the information on his site I have to admit I’m really looking forward to it.

Perhaps old news in the blogosphere at this stage, but I wanted to give Perlico a mention for their recent viral marketing campaign involving a duck quacking on their IVR (Interactive Voice Response) telephone system. Yes a duck quacking, you read it correctly. Ring 1890 88 66 07 and wait to hear option three. Before any of the options are read out you do of course have to listen to their marketing lines about how much cheaper than Eircom they are.

The marketing team at Perlico obviously knew that people would talk (and write) about this because it’s a bit off the wall however I’m not sure they were expecting over 70,000 calls to their sales number in just over three days. The 70,000 figure comes from Mark Cleary, Perlicos COO. Cleary says “Since this launch, based on the volumes of calls, the campaign has been a phenomenal success. In just over 3 days we have received over 70,000 calls and added a significant number of new customers as a result which make this one of the most successful viral campaigns in Ireland.”

Cleary also says “This campaign started off entirely by word of mouth which helps to demonstrate the power of the Internet and Email as a viral marketing approach. The duck quacking IVR has now been featured on several radio stations across the country and the call volumes continue to increase by the hour”

Of course we all knew the power of the Internet and Email as viral marketing approaches, right? right? Fair play to Perlico, their marketing team deserve a raise for this.

You may have noticed that I’ve recently been making use of this blogs XML feed to a) display links/descriptions to my three most recent posts on the akamarketing.com homepage and b) display links to my ten most recent posts in the left navigation bar of most of my sites pages. This was done to try and funnel more site visitors to the blog because that’s where I’m doing most of my updates and although it’s early days it seems to be working.

It’s actually quite easy to do, I basically just parsed the standard Wordpress XML feed with DOMXML and then outputted the specific information I needed. The code for generating links to my last ten posts I used on the left nav bar is available at: http://www.akamarketing.com/wordpress-links.php.txt with the running version at http://www.akamarketing.com/wordpress-links.php

By examining the structure of a Wordpress feed (mine is located at http://www.akamarketing.com/blog/feed) you’ll see that the details of each post is stored in the item element. By getting and looping through all the item elements it is possible to access specific information such as post link, title and description. In this case I’ve used the description information for the title attribute of the link meaning that when someone mouses over a certain link a snippet from the corresponding post will appear on screen.  

Feel free to use my code, check if you have DOMXML support first of course.

Just installed a neat little plugin for Wordpress called Sociable which outputs image based social bookmarking links on various Wordpress pages to allow my blog readers (all two of them :-)) to quickly bookmark and share interesting posts. A tonne of social bookmarking sites are supported as shown by the following partial screenshot of the options interface, click the image to view a full size version.

You’ll see that at the moment I’m outputting links to about 20 social bookmarking sites (out of a total of about 60) which is more than enough really. I’m really conscious of not having excess flair on my blog by having too many widgets and icons cluttering up the place. Jeff Atwood on his excellent Coding Horror blog lists excess flair as #4 on his list of thirteen blog clichés so I certainly want to avoid that, in saying that though I want to make sure I’m linking to all the most popular social bookmarking sites. Since I’m a complete social bookmarking notice perhaps you guys could tell me if I missed any of the big players in the SB market.

As usual with Wordpress plugins the install is a piece of cake which everyone should be able to handle, anyhow if your in the market for a social bookmarking plugin for Wordpress I definitely recommend you check Sociable out.

Since I’m still suffering from last nights work social to get drunk with my now ex boss one last time before he left our ICT team and since I’m off to the fight tomorrow (no not in the Swiss Cottage - in the point depot!) and hopefully the big Dublin & Kerry game in Croker on Sunday I’m just going to take it ham & cheesy tonight and relax with a few beats and update my blog.

For this update and in true Richard Hearne style (see Unison & Continuum) I’m going to ‘out’ someone for not playing by the rules. The unfortunate ’so and so’ on this occasion is popular Dublin based radio station Spin 103.8 who appears to be conducting some good old fashioned meta jacking on their offical website located at http://www.spin1038.com/. Meta Jacking is the process of putting your competitors names in your meta keywords and or meta description tags in the hope that if someone searches for your competitors name your website would come up in the results too. Spin have done this by including the names of rival radio stations such as 98FM, FM104, Today FM and some others in their meta keywords tag, similar stuff is being done with their meta description tag too. Although I’m not a lawyer I believe I’m right when I say that this is a form of trademark infringement and could potentially result in a day in court for the Spin 103.8 legal eagles. The meta keywords tag as lifted directly from their home page is below:

I’m wondering who does their search engine optimisation because even putting aside the legal issues this sort of technique doesn’t even work. It may have worked somewhat years ago but these days meta tags aren’t given much value at all by the search engines so it’s actually a complete waste of time. Your thoughts are welcome, additionally I wouldn’t mind a couple of trackbacks :-)…

Everyone knows the benefits of using a blog and blogging for marketing reasons. Blogging is simply one of the best ways to get yourself or your company known as an expert in your industry and perhaps more importantly to get in touch with potential clients. Blogging as a recruitment tool though? This is something I’m currently pondering the merits of. I suppose it like other things has pros and cons, I’ve noticed that the iQ Content guys seem to be giving it a bash anyhow. They’re looking for a project manager and have already got some ’press’ from many of Ireland’s leading bloggers. The following URLs show this:

http://www.mneylon.com/blog/archives/2007/08/14/project-manager-required-chez-iq-content/
http://www.mulley.net/2007/08/20/fluffy-links-monday-august-20th-2007/
http://www.redcardinal.ie/general/14-08-2007/iqcontent-project-manager/

I’m going to keep an eye on this to see how they get on but seemingly they already have had applications from people who learnt about the job on other peoples blogs. It’s an interesting approach and sure as hell beats paying sites like Monster & IrishJobs to advertise vacant positions. Good job from iQ Content - pun intended. Your thoughts are as always welcome.