(Book Review) Designing UX: Forms, 1st Edition

Overview

Review Published: October, 2018.

From form designer, researcher, and author Jessica Enders comes a comprehensive guide to designing user-friendly online forms.

From discovering how users’ mental models, to designing a seamlessly interactive form, this book serves as an in-depth primer for those looking to improve how their products gather information.

Rating:

3.5 / 5

(Central Idea Quality, Presentation Quality)

What does this score mean?

Difficulty:

Intermediate (Assumes some prior knowledge of UX research & web design).

Length:

276 pages.

Where to Buy It:

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What's Good

In-depth content; the author does a great job of breaking down the form creation process into distinct sections, and addressing various best-practices (and why they work) into digestible bites.
Well researched & sourced; the author uses her considerable experience with forms and uses that along with frequently referenced articles and further reading.
Content goes from problems to solutions; this book is written in a conversational tone, and while you’ll need a bit of UX Research/Web Design knowledge to make the most of it, the content is easy to read and typically flows well.

What Can Be Improved

Content sometimes needs a bit more fleshing out; while the content is great, it does run into a few problems that force you to stop and look things up when particular items/examples are not illustrated or addressed (i.e. input field types and how they relate to each other, button layouts within responsive forms, customer-facing forms vs. settings-based modals, etc.).
Sometimes difficult to reference; sometimes the author runs through a few alternatives for each form design challenge before arriving at the best-practice, and with the Kindle ebook version being terribly formatted (which is not the author’s fault), making a quick scan for that best-practice becomes more difficult.

The Bottom Line

Critical for input-centric products; this book is essential for any UX designer working on products that need significant input from users, and the more complex that input the more essential this book becomes.
For intermediate to experienced UX designers working with input-rich projects; while forms typically get thought about the least in any UX project, they typically make or break your an organization’s ability to capture and retain busy users (i.e. just try shopping for car insurance to see what I mean).
Avoid the Kindle edition; for $10 more (about $30 USD total), the print edition is far superior to the mangled mess that ended up on eReaders, and makes this book a good value for those looking to design better forms.