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Towards more usable forms

Ryan Brill came out with an interesting idea yesterday; he describes it in the post Experimenting With Highlighting.

Essentially, he’s replicated the field-highlighting you see in Apple interfaces - when you bring focus to a field in iTunes, for instance, a little blue border pops up around it to help show you where you are.

Like Ryan, I’m not quite sure how useful this actually is - it’d be nice to see a study comparing unmanipulated forms, this technique, and the somewhat more common technique of changing the background color of the focused field. I’m guessing such cues only exert a significant effect in long forms, but I’m not sure of that by any means.

Regardless, any developments that draw attention to the (often sad) state of form design on the web are a good thing in my book. Nice job, Ryan!