If anything, these are our benchmarks that any web form design must meet.

Extracted and condensed are the survey results below.  Actual links (with nice graphical charts) to both parts of the survey follows right after.

Here it goes. Web Form Design Pattern Best Practices Part 1…

- “Sign Up” is most popular link title to form (40%)
- The header is the most popular place to put the link (59%)
- Placed at top right hand corner (76%)
- Simplified design when compared to page layouts (61%)
- Benefits of registration are presented next to form (41%)
- One-page forms (91%)
- Using bold to highlight title of input fields (62%)
- Right aligned labels closer to input fields (41%)
- Only 3 to 5 mandatory fields (50%)
- 6 to 8 mandatory fields (30%)
- Zero optional fields, only collected after sign-up is complete (62%)
- Less than 5 optional fields (98%)
- Vertically arranged forms (86%)
- Do not have asterisks* to indicate mandatory fields (78%)
- Progress indicator (9%)
- Simple web form with as little fields as possible (86%)
- Grouped and divided by white space (69%)
- Divided by borders (22%)

Web Form Design Pattern Best Practices Part 2…

- No hover, active, focus effects in use (84%)
- Static help support placed obviously next to input field (57%)
- No hints (33%)
- Error messages at the top – no fields highlighted (30%)
- Error messages highlighted at form fields – no top message (29%)
- Both top error message and error fields highlighted (25%)
- Real-time AJAX validation warning or error (22%)
- Colour Green used to indicate success, and Red to show failure (97%)
- Not necessary to ‘confirm email address’ by second input field (82%)
- Necessary to confirm password (72%)
- Captcha not in use (59%)
- Cancel button not used (92%)
- Left-aligned submit button (56%)
- After successful sign-up, load non-mandatory fields or tell friends (45%)
- After successful sign-up, recommend places to go or link to click (33%)
- After successful sign-up, basic thank you page with no extra links (4%)
- After successful sign-up, redirect to homepage (2%)
- Using tab indexes (99%)
- ‘System Talk’ tone and manner – Login, Password, Location (38%)
- ‘Business Talk’ tone and manner – Your name, Confirm Password (38%)
- ‘Conversational talk’ tone and manner – Tell us who you are, etc (22%)

Too much text! IToo much to read. Don’t understand. I know.

So here’s the link to both parts – Part 1, Part 2.

UI Design Pattern is a strong marriage of Information Architecture (IA) and User Interface (UI) turning a set of User Experience (UX) goal into simple intuitive interfaces.

Here is a collection of design pattern library from UI-Patterns.com. Great help for when designing intuitive next gen user interfaces.

“UI-Patterns.com are not the first to create a UI design library.
While other pattern collections are useful, they are far from coherent
and complete. The purpose of this site is over time to fill some of the
gaps – especially by providing code examples as to how how the
different patterns can be implemented: to join theory with practice.”

Input Feedback
The user have entered input into the system expects to receive feedback on the result of the submission.

Account Registration
You wish to know who the active user is in order to provide personalized content or opportunities to conduct a purchase.

Vote To Promote
The user wants to promote a specific piece of content in order to democratically help decide what content is more popular.

Lazy Registration
The user wants to immediately use you and try your website without conducting a formal registration beforehand.

Password Strength Meter
You want to make sure your user’s passwords a sufficiently strong in order to prevent malicious attacks.

Inline Help Box
The user needs an assistive introduction aside the interaction he is about to perform.

Tag Cloud
The user wants to browse content by popularity or most elaborate topic.

Tag
The user wants to find more data in the same category and/or contribute data in the same category.

Live Preview
The user wants to check how changes in form fields effect and end result as quickly as possible.

WYSIWYG
The user wants to add formatted text content, but does not have the know-how to write HTML.

Wiki
You want to provide the user the option of adding to- or editing information on a website.

Live Filter
The user wishes to specify a search by different categories to narrow down results.

Archive
The user wants to search for an article of interest by chronological order.

Pagination
The user needs to view a subset of sorted data that is not easily displayed on one page.

Continuous Scrolling
The user needs to view a subset of data that is not easily displayed on a single page.

Blank Slate
The user needs to get started and get a feel of how the application will feel when fully in function and filled with data.

Tip A Friend
The user wants to share something of interest with a peer.

Steps Left
The user is about to go through the process of filling in data over several steps and is in need of guidance.

Coupon
You want to attract your users to conduct a purchase of one of your products.

Subscription
The user wants to start a subscription of a service.