Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

form help

The other day, Rob sent me an invitation to join the Django-based file / information-sharing site Pownce. I thought their sign-up form was really well done, with instructive contextual help bubbles that pop up for each item on the form and explain why that particular bit of information is important. (Screenshot)

On a related note, Luke Wroblewski, who led a great session about Web form design patterns this spring at SXSW, had an interesting essay recently at UXMatters about different styles of presenting “help” information on Web forms. On the Pownce-style inline help, he offers a note of caution:

A potential drawback of this type of automatic Help system is that people are unlikely to know any Help text is available until they begin to fill out the form. There’s often very little in the presentation of these forms that indicates Help is available. As a result, users who feel they may need help completing a form could get discouraged and not even try.

I agree to an extent, but I would add that it really depends on the design of the form (is it possible to understand what to do even without those help bubbles?) and on the savviness of the site’s target audience.

Updated 8/7 at 11:55 a.m. - Ask the CSS Guy has a nice tutorial about how to set up these kinds of contextual help bubbles using CSS and JavaScript. (Link found via Rob’s del.icio.us feed.)