What type of information is important for interactive forms on a web site?
August 29th, 2008
To determine what information is important for interactive forms you must understand the goal of the form. What is the information needed? Also, what information do you want the user to know? Depending on the types of information you will have the user submit will determine the fields you will use in the form.
The basic essentials are these: For text and numeric data you will use text and combo boxes. If you provide the information for the user to select, you may choose from radio buttons, lists, or combo boxes. Of course, you may want the user to select multiple options. The use of check boxes or list boxes will work nicely for multiple options. The use of buttons is a no-brainer. Whether it is text or looks like a button, you will use buttons to interact with the user to open files, play sound, movies, or submitting or clearing form data.
Have you thought about security and/or validation? You might consider using digital signature to verify the user’s identity and form validation is the process of checking a form’s values against a standard of expected values. It is a way to proofread or spell check what your user has entered as input. An example would be an expected 9 number combination and the user entered an email address. This would return as invalid content. Typically checked are empty fields, valid and well formed email addresses, dates, and the aforementioned a number entered in a text expected field (or vice-verse). If the tested field contains the expected input then the result is returned true and the form data is expected to be good data. It is important to use validation for online forms to add an extra bit of reliability and save time by ensuring a certain level of quality.
References:
http://validator.w3.org/about.html
http://www.w3schools.com/js/js_form_validation.asp
2007 CivicPlus website management conference, “Next Generation Government Websites”
Entry Filed under: All, DHTML, JavaScript, web design
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed