What I got out of the uPenn Web Symposium

This week I had the opportunity to attend the uPenn Higher Education Web Symposium.While the this conference was focused on IT Professionals working in Higher Education, there were world renowned experts in the fields of usability, user centered d3sign, CSS, AJAX and many others making it was extremely relevant to my work.

I attended a Full Day Workshop on Web Form Design best Practices by the esteemed Luke Wroblewski who currently works as a Principal Designer and Product Manager for Yahoo!.He also runs a design consultancy, LukeW, and a publication, Functioning Form.

Here are some web form best practices:

• Put Labels above fields for increased readability and accessibility to screen readers and other languages
  
• Don’t include non-required fields when possible.
• If most fields are required provodie
• If you are going to provide in-line validation, wait until the user has moved to the next field to validate
• Make it conversational
• “Keep, Cut, Postpone, or Explain.”
• Less is more

These were culled from live to site analytics, usability testing, eye-tracking studies, and best practice surveys.