Book Review: Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski

EDIT: Mr. Rosenfeld was kind enough to offer a discount code for all Sugarenia.com readers: with the code SUGARENIA you get -10% while purchasing any of their books. Now is the time to get them, guys!
At first, I was kinda hesitant to go on and buy such a niche book - after all, what’s so exciting about coding and designing web forms?
Wrong.
Mr. Wroblewski’s book taught me that web forms are all kinds of designer fun, and this is not a euphemism. It’s just what the author says:
Forms make or break the most crucial online interactions: checkout, registration, and any task requiring information entry.
Imagine how many times you decided not to join a service just because of its scary registration form - or how many times you’ve mistakenly filled in your credit card number to a checkout form that didn’t support multiple formats of input.
Get the point?
Web Form Design is a simple, well-written book: it seems to have borrowed the blogging way of stating facts, and this is a good thing: simple, coherent writing, to-the-point explanations and the ubiquitous “Best Practices” list of points in the end of each chapter strike a chord: it’s a specialized blog turned book! That’s not too bad, is it?
Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski is a book highly recommended for interface designers, both on web and more traditional media. It can help everyone that wants to improve her skills in laying out inputs and textareas, and make you feel good too in the meanwhile.
You surprised me, mr. Wroblewski. Pleasantly, I might say. I think I’ll get Site Seeing too.
luke wroblewski, web form design, site seeing
June 30th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
Nice find Sugar! Thanks!
July 1st, 2008 at 1:04 am
I’ll probably get this sometime too. Love the subject plus I’m a big fan of Rosenfeld and I’m curious about his publishing efforts…
I’m under the impression that Mr. Wroblewski discusses “classic” forms and only tackles the subject of smarter, ajax-enhanced forms in the last “What’s Next?” chapter. Is it so?
July 2nd, 2008 at 7:40 am
@gterez That’s not true - there are bits of Ajax-y goodness scattered around the book, it’s one of the most current books I’ve read, actually.
It contains all kinds of nice real-life examples (well, it contains *only* real life examples, apart from the occasional mockup).
Definitely a recommended reading - hey, use the discount code and get it while it’s hot!