Filling out web forms rots

Chris Breisch has a great post "Death By a Thousand Textboxes" where he laments about web forms where you have three boxes instead of one to fill in a phone number.  Those actually only really bug me if the active form cell doesn't jump to the next one as you hit the right number of digits.

That being said he does close the post with a great bit of UI advice that is well worth remembering ... for all the UI work we do:

I think UI experimentation is not only desirable, but necessary. If we don't experiment, we can't evolve UI forward. However, you have to do it the right way:

1. Have a complete understanding of the current convention and how it arose
2. Have a good, reasoned argument for deviating from the convention
3. Collect usage data on your experiments
4. Make decisions based on the usage data

If you're not collecting usage data, or your reason is "it looks better this way", then you're doing it wrong, and you should stick with the conventions.

Tags: web development, software development, UI