Forms are the lifeblood of any company’s website, but if you are a startup, they can determine whether or not you have a chance at success. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen and his team at the Nielsen Norman Group have spent a good amount of time improving all aspects of usability for the web, but this series of form tips can determine whether you have success or failure. We all know that reducing the number of fields is critical, but even when you have a lot of fields, there are ways to make it better. The examples in this post are amazing for how obvious they seem, but we are all guilty of getting it wrong, especially when it comes to very subtle, but impactful grouping of fields and their labels.
Tip #1: Place the label closer to the associated text field than to other text fields.
This principle of placing related items closer to each other isn’t new; it’s actually the Law of Proximity from Gestalt psychology. Gestalt psychologists were concerned with how and why the brain perceives an object as a whole rather than as a sum of individual parts. They came up with a several laws explaining how people organize visual information; the Law of Proximity was one of these.
Go read more of their post to get all the details and how-tos: Group Form Elements Effectively Using White Space.
