Usability Redesign (Get yours started today!)

From confusion to clear communication

Dec 29
Worst Form Labels Ever

I have seen some pretty bad form ideas during my tenure as a UI designer, this one beats them all. I was renewing my Surfer Magazine subscription over at magazines.com when I ran into this…

magazines.com payment form Figure 1 - magazine.com's bad form labels

…not so bad right? Wrong, as soon I you tab into billing address you get this…

disappearing labels Figure 2 - magazine.com's payment labels disappear on focus

Where did my label go? I have no idea what to type in this field do you, looks like billing address. Nope there are two fields for billing address below, so I guess I will have to clear the field and tab out so I can see the label again. Yikes, that was awkward.

I almost abandoned my cart out of principal and would have if Surfer Magazine hadn’t neglected to ask me if I wanted to renew. Maybe they are mad because I moved to Portland, anyway I soldiered on and finished the purchase but I bet not everyone has enough land locked surfer motivation to push them though this form trickery.

Labeling your form has been well researched by Luke Wroblewski and countless others, there is really no excuses for this type of UI hackery.

Print the labels outside the fields run a A/B split test on it and I bet you get increased conversion rates.

just a bit more space to make it work Figure 3 - magazine.com's payment labels outside the fields

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Suimple is a Portland Oregon based user interface design and development lab. Suimple is clear communication through usability and web standards. learn more

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