April 24, 2009

Tuesday 19th May - Caroline Jarrett - Label placement in forms (and other time-consuming controversies)

We are delighted to announce Caroline Jarrett as our next speaker. Caroline is a world expert on Form Design. In this talk, Caroline will use eye-tracking data, and her many years experience of designing and testing forms, to give you ideas of where to put labels on forms and get us thinking about form details such as required field indicators and colons on labels.

Caroline Jarrett

Caroline Jarrett started to work with forms when delivering Optical Character Recognition systems to the then Inland Revenue. The systems didn't work very well, and it turned out that the problems arose because people made mistakes when filling in forms. She developed a fascination with the challenge of making forms easy to fill in, a fascination that shows no signs of wearing off over 15 years later. During this time Caroline has worked with the Open University, Cancer Research UK, the Ministry of Justice (HM Courts Service), the Financial Services Authority, the University of Glasgow and the University of Cambridge.

Caroline is Co-author of Forms that work: Designing web forms for usability the companion volume to Ginny Redish's hugely popular book Letting go of the words: Writing web content that works.

"The humble form: it may seem boring, but most of your website's value passes through forms. Follow Jarrett & Gaffney's guidelines, and you'll probably double your online profits."

Jakob Nielsen, Principal, Nielsen Norman Group



EVENT DETAILS

Date: Tuesday 19th May

Time: 18.30 for 18.45 to 20.00

Venue: Microsoft Research, Cambridge ( Map & address - note that Cambridge is just 45 minutes from Kings Cross but you will need to get a taxi to get to Microsoft Research, or pack a Brompton).

Registration: The event is FREE and you do not need to be a UK UPA member to attend. There is no registration but in the unlikely event that we fill 120 seats, they will be allocated on a first come first served basis.

If for any reason we have to cancel the event we will post this information on the Cambridge Usability website in advance (we have not cancelled one yet though).

Our thanks to Microsoft Research Labs for their sponsorship of this event.

Posted by cambridgeusability at April 24, 2009 01:17 PM