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We scan from top to bottom

October 3, 2009 by 4 Comments

I shop online so often that it’s second nature for me to immediately start typing into an shipping/billing address form based on the textbox widths and layout. However, as I was just checking out from Garnet Hill, I realized something was off.

Field labels are underneath the text field. Wow.

Had it not been for the Middle Initial small textbox I would’ve skipped the top line entirely.

This one’s for you, Luke W.

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Whitney Hess is a coach and writer helping product teams and senior leaders make better decisions through the principles of user experience. She believes empathy builds empires.

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  • supaspoida

    I see this problem much more with printed forms, particularly government forms. Customs & Immigration, DMV, taxes, etc. Only there when I print things on the wrong line it's not so easy to fix!

  • jcampbell1

    This form reminds me of WuFoo.com (those guys have a cool product). They do some really nice stuff, but they put the labels on the bottom for the address.

    Here is an example from wufoo.com
    https://examples.wufoo.com/forms/workshop-regis…

    I think it can work, but you have to be really careful.

  • http://www.DrinksAreOnMe.net Dale Cruse

    To play the devil's advocate, if “Billing Address” were the legend in an overall fieldset, would it have still been a problem? If not, this seems very fixable!

  • Shai Idelson

    One obvious problem with this is that a label for a drop down is hidden when one clicks on that drop down.

    Beyond that, like Whit's heading implies, it would take longer for a person to fill this out because of the zig zag scan pattern this creates.