WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Can we prevent "form fatigue"?

for

From: Gareth Dart
Date: Aug 9, 2007 2:40AM

No reources to suggest, unfortunately, but a little bit of personal
experience...

Having had to design something similar in the past, after I did a few
working examples, I came to the conclusion that it was far better to
have a fewer number of pages, even if they appeared somewhat crowded.
Even having coded the examples myself, I quickly found it tiresome to
have to plough through lots of pages - it was far better to go through
only a few pages of many fields. There was a clear parallel with the
paper world - if you handed someone a form of a hundred pages, with
perhaps only three or four questions on each page, they would think it
very peculiar indeed.

An opinion now: usability isn't about making pages absolutely usable no
matter what, it's about making pages as usable as possible within the
constraints of the function they are expected to carry out.

Another related approach is to have people download and then complete a
blank excel spreadsheet, which they then upload back to the site for
checking. This is a valid alternative in cases where there is a lot of
complex data to be returned.

HTH,

Gareth

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Cliff Tyllick
Sent: Thursday 9 August 2007 00:51
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] Can we prevent "form fatigue"?

I am reviewing an application in development that requires dozens of
fields to be completed. (We have lots of information to gather, so there
is no getting around the sheer number of fields.) We're trying to figure
out where to try to fit between these two extremes:
---an infinite number of one-field pages ---one page with an infinite
number of fields

(I exaggerate only slightly.)

Is there good research out there to give a sense of how to balance "many
pages of few fields" and "few pages of many fields"? (Each "page"
will end with a "Done" button or similar interface to check and verify
the data received so far.)


Cliff Tyllick
Web development coordinator
Agency Communications Division
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality
512/239-4516
<EMAIL REMOVED>