Sep
27
So, in learning from those who came before us, we decided to assign “Tab” for jumping between questions without off any validation checks. This way, you can move around the form without having to use the mouse. Pressing “Tab” brings the next question into view, ready to be filled out; “Shift” + “Tab,” in the same way, take you back to the previous question; and the arrow keys let you move up and down in the form as you’d expect.
Our next choice in keys was much harder to make: how to use the “Enter” key. It’s widely used in many apps to complete an action, but is also used to add a line break to text. In a form, we feel it’s far more common to need to quickly complete an action than it is to need to write multiple paragraphs of text, so we chose to use the “Enter” key to validate and submit responses. If an answer does not validate, then the user is asked to correct their answer; otherwise, they’ll move onto the next question. Then, we used the common “Shift” + “Enter” shortcut for line breaks when writing multiple paragraphs of text, the same shortcut commonly used in chat apps like Facebook Messenger.
Ideally, though, users shouldn’t have to use “Tab” or manually scroll to navigate forms at all, even though the forms show only one question at a time. That’s why we designed the forms to auto-scroll to the next question as soon as the current question is answered. Most forms require you to scroll through to see all of the questions, or even click to other pages to continue the survey. Our approach keeps respondents focused on the conversation and makes it far quicker to fill in the form.
After deciding on the basics of our UI, we tackled interaction design as the next challenge. Our focus was a computer without a touchscreen, accelerometer, webcam or even a mouse. All that is needed to interact is a keyboard. After all, if you’re just answering questions, what more should you need? Traditionally, a typical form forces you to move back and forth between the mouse and keyboard. You’ll click in a text box to type something in, and then reach for your mouse or squint to tap on your smartphone’s screen to fill in a multiple-choice question. If the form doesn’t already look bad enough, then the rows of tiny bullet points should be enough to get respondents screaming for the hills.
As dated as it might sound in the age of smartphones and tablets, we decided that keyboard navigation would be central to our redesigned forms. Users have to use a keyboard for questions that need a typed answer anyway, so we added keyboard shortcuts for all other types of questions. For “Yes” or “No” questions, you would tap “y” for yes and “n” for no. For multiple-choice questions, each answer is assigned a letter. For ratings, respondents would tap the number corresponding to their rating, from 1 to 0 (ten).
Navigation between questions raised a new issue: the “Enter” key or the “Tab” key? How would these two buttons work in the context of Typeforms? At first, we allowed “Tab” and “Enter” to be used interchangeably to move to the next question, but assigning two buttons to do exactly the same thing seemed weird. So, we asked ourselves, what could we learn from what’s been done before?
In every other app or website, the “Tab” key is most commonly used to move between elements. You use it to jump between fields in a traditional form and to move between parts of a Web page. It is a non-committal way to move around. The “Enter” key, on the other hand, is most commonly used to commit to a decision. It’s the button we press to take an action or to submit a traditional form.
So, in learning from those who came before us, we decided to assign “Tab” for jumping between questions without setting off any validation checks. This way, you can move around the form without having to use the mouse. Pressing “Tab” brings the next question into view, ready to be filled out; “Shift” + “Tab,” in the same way, take you back to the previous question; and the arrow keys let you move up and down in the form as you’d expect.
Our next choice in keys was much harder to make: how to use the “Enter” key. It’s widely used in many apps to complete an action, but is also used to add a line break to text. In a form, we feel it’s far more common to need to quickly complete an action than it is to need to write multiple paragraphs of text, so we chose to use the “Enter” key to validate and submit responses. If an answer does not validate, then the user is asked to correct their answer; otherwise, they’ll move onto the next question. Then, we used the common “Shift” + “Enter” shortcut for line breaks when writing multiple paragraphs of text, the same shortcut commonly used in chat apps like Facebook Messenger.
Ideally, though, users shouldn’t have to use “Tab” or manually scroll to navigate forms at all, even though the forms show only one question at a time. That’s why we designed the forms to auto-scroll to the next question as soon as the current question is answered. Most forms require you to scroll through to see all of the questions, or even click to other pages to continue the survey. Our approach keeps respondents focused on the conversation and makes it far quicker to fill in the form.
After deciding on the basics of our UI, we tackled interaction design as the next challenge. Our focus was a computer without a touchscreen, accelerometer, webcam or even a mouse. All that is needed to interact is a keyboard. After all, if you’re just answering questions, what more should you need?
Navigation between questions raised a new issue: the “Enter” key or the “Tab” key? How would these two buttons work in the context of Typeforms? At first, we allowed “Tab” and “Enter” to be used interchangeably to move to the next question, but assigning two buttons to do exactly the same thing seemed weird. So, we asked ourselves, what could we learn from what’s been done before?
In every other app or website, the “Tab” key is most commonly used to move between elements. You use it to jump between fields in a traditional form and to move between parts of a Web page. It is a non-committal way to move around. The “Enter” key, on the other hand, is most commonly used to commit to a decision. It’s the button we press to take an action or to submit a traditional form.
So, in learning from those who came before us, we decided to assign “Tab” for jumping between questions without setting off any validation checks. This way, you can move around the form without having to use the mouse. Pressing “Tab” brings the next question into view, ready to be filled out; “Shift” + “Tab,” in the same way, take you back to the previous question; and the arrow keys let you move up and down in the form as you’d expect.
Our next choice in keys was much harder to make: how to use the “Enter” key. It’s widely used in many apps to complete an action, but is also used to add a line break to text. In a form, we feel it’s far more common to need to quickly complete an action than it is to need to write multiple paragraphs of text, so we chose to use the “Enter” key to validate and submit responses. If an answer does not validate, then the user is asked to correct their answer; otherwise, they’ll move onto the next question. Then, we used the common “Shift” + “Enter” shortcut for line breaks when writing multiple paragraphs of text, the same shortcut commonly used in chat apps like Facebook Messenger.
Ideally, though, users shouldn’t have to use “Tab” or manually scroll to navigate forms at all, even though the forms show only one question at a time. That’s why we designed the forms to auto-scroll to the next question as soon as the current question is answered. Most forms require you to scroll through to see all of the questions, or even click to other pages to continue the survey. Our approach keeps respondents focused on the conversation and makes it far quicker to fill in the form.
After deciding on the basics of our UI, we tackled interaction design as the next challenge. Our focus was a computer without a touchscreen, accelerometer, webcam or even a mouse. All that is needed to interact is a keyboard. After all, if you’re just answering questions, what more should you need? Traditionally, a typical form forces you to move back and forth between the mouse and keyboard. You’ll click in a text box to type something in, and then reach for your mouse or squint to tap on your smartphone’s screen to fill in a multiple-choice question. If the form doesn’t already look bad enough, then the rows of tiny bullet points should be enough to get respondents screaming for the hills.
Navigation between questions raised a new issue: the “Enter” key or the “Tab” key? How would these two buttons work in the context of Typeforms? At first, we allowed “Tab” and “Enter” to be used interchangeably to move to the next question, but assigning two buttons to do exactly the same thing seemed weird. So, we asked ourselves, what could we learn from what’s been done before?
In every other app or website, the “Tab” key is most commonly used to move between elements. You use it to jump between fields in a traditional form and to move between parts of a Web page. It is a non-committal way to move around. The “Enter” key, on the other hand, is most commonly used to commit to a decision. It’s the button we press to take an action or to submit a traditional form.
So, in learning from those who came before us, we decided to assign “Tab” for jumping between questions without setting off any validation checks. This way, you can move around the form without having to use the mouse. Pressing “Tab” brings the next question into view, ready to be filled out; “Shift” + “Tab,” in the same way, take you back to the previous question; and the arrow keys let you move up and down in the form as you’d expect.
Our next choice in keys was much harder to make: how to use the “Enter” key. It’s widely used in many apps to complete an action, but is also used to add a line break to text. In a form, we feel it’s far more common to need to quickly complete an action than it is to need to write multiple paragraphs of text, so we chose to use the “Enter” key to validate and submit responses. If an answer does not validate, then the user is asked to correct their answer; otherwise, they’ll move onto the next question. Then, we used the common “Shift” + “Enter” shortcut for line breaks when writing multiple paragraphs of text, the same shortcut commonly used in chat apps like Facebook Messenger.
Ideally, though, users shouldn’t have to use “Tab” or manually scroll to navigate forms at all, even though the forms show only one question at a time. That’s why we designed the forms to auto-scroll to the next question as soon as the current question is answered. Most forms require you to scroll through to see all of the questions, or even click to other pages to continue the survey. Our approach keeps respondents focused on the conversation and makes it far quicker to fill in the form.
After deciding on the basics of our UI, we tackled interaction design as the next challenge. Our focus was a computer without a touchscreen, accelerometer, webcam or even a mouse. All that is needed to interact is a keyboard. After all, if you’re just answering questions, what more should you need? Traditionally, a typical form forces you to move back and forth between the mouse and keyboard. You’ll click in a text box to type something in, and then reach for your mouse or squint to tap on your smartphone’s screen to fill in a multiple-choice question. If the form doesn’t already look bad enough, then the rows of tiny bullet points should be enough to get respondents screaming for the hills.
Dated as it might sound in the age of smartphones and tablets, we decided that keyboard navigation would be central to our redesigned forms. Users have to use a keyboard for questions that need a typed answer anyway, so we added keyboard shortcuts for all other types of questions. For “Yes” or “No” questions, you would tap “y” for yes and “n” for no. For multiple-choice questions, each answer is assigned a letter. For ratings, respondents would tap the number corresponding to their rating, from 1 to 0 (ten).
As dated as it might sound in the age of smartphones and tablets, we decided that keyboard navigation would be central to our redesigned forms. Users have to use a keyboard for questions that need a typed answer anyway, so we added keyboard shortcuts for all other types of questions. For “Yes” or “No” questions, you would tap “y” for yes and “n” for no. For multiple-choice questions, each answer is assigned a letter. For ratings, respondents would tap the number corresponding to their rating, from 1 to 0 (ten).
Navigation between questions raised a new issue: the “Enter” key or the “Tab” key? How would these two buttons work in the context of Typeforms? At first, we allowed “Tab” and “Enter” to be used interchangeably to move to the next question, but assigning two buttons to do exactly the same thing seemed weird. So, we asked ourselves, what could we learn from what’s been done before?
In every other app or website, the “Tab” key is most commonly used to move between elements. You use it to jump between fields in a traditional form and to move between parts of a Web page. It is a non-committal way to move around. The “Enter” key, on the other hand, is most commonly used to commit to a decision. It’s the button we press to take an action or to submit a traditional form.
So, in learning from those who came before us, we decided to assign “Tab” for jumping between questions without setting off any validation checks. This way, you can move around the form without having to use the mouse. Pressing “Tab” brings the next question into view, ready to be filled out; “Shift” + “Tab,” in the same way, take you back to the previous question; and the arrow keys let you move up and down in the form as you’d expect.
Our next choice in keys was much harder to make: how to use the “Enter” key. It’s widely used in many apps to complete an action, but is also used to add a line break to text. In a form, we feel it’s far more common to need to quickly complete an action than it is to need to write multiple paragraphs of text, so we chose to use the “Enter” key to validate and submit responses. If an answer does not validate, then the user is asked to correct their answer; otherwise, they’ll move onto the next question. Then, we used the common “Shift” + “Enter” shortcut for line breaks when writing multiple paragraphs of text, the same shortcut commonly used in chat apps like Facebook Messenger.
Ideally, though, users shouldn’t have to use “Tab” or manually scroll to navigate forms at all, even though the forms show only one question at a time. That’s why we designed the forms to auto-scroll to the next question as soon as the current question is answered. Most forms require you to scroll through to see all of the questions, or even click to other pages to continue the survey. Our approach keeps respondents focused on the conversation and makes it far quicker to fill in the form.
After deciding on the basics of our UI, we tackled interaction design as the next challenge. Our focus was a computer without a touchscreen, accelerometer, webcam or even a mouse. All that is needed to interact is a keyboard. After all, if you’re just answering questions, what more should you need? Traditionally, a typical form forces you to move back and forth between the mouse and keyboard. You’ll click in a text box to type something in, and then reach for your mouse or squint to tap on your smartphone’s screen to fill in a multiple-choice question. If the form doesn’t already look bad enough, then the rows of tiny bullet points should be enough to get respondents screaming for the hills.
Traditionally, a typical form forces you to move back and forth between the mouse and keyboard. You’ll click in a text box to type something in, and then reach for your mouse or squint to tap on your smartphone’s screen to fill in a multiple-choice question. If the form doesn’t already look bad enough, then the rows of tiny bullet points should be enough to get respondents screaming for the hills.
As dated as it might sound in the age of smartphones and tablets, we decided that keyboard navigation would be central to our redesigned forms. Users have to use a keyboard for questions that need a typed answer anyway, so we added keyboard shortcuts for all other types of questions. For “Yes” or “No” questions, you would tap “y” for yes and “n” for no. For multiple-choice questions, each answer is assigned a letter. For ratings, respondents would tap the number corresponding to their rating, from 1 to 0 (ten).
Navigation between questions raised a new issue: the “Enter” key or the “Tab” key? How would these two buttons work in the context of Typeforms? At first, we allowed “Tab” and “Enter” to be used interchangeably to move to the next question, but assigning two buttons to do exactly the same thing seemed weird. So, we asked ourselves, what could we learn from what’s been done before?
In every other app or website, the “Tab” key is most commonly used to move between elements. You use it to jump between fields in a traditional form and to move between parts of a Web page. It is a non-committal way to move around. The “Enter” key, on the other hand, is most commonly used to commit to a decision. It’s the button we press to take an action or to submit a traditional form.
So, in learning from those who came before us, we decided to assign “Tab” for jumping between questions without setting off any validation checks. This way, you can move around the form without having to use the mouse. Pressing “Tab” brings the next question into view, ready to be filled out; “Shift” + “Tab,” in the same way, take you back to the previous question; and the arrow keys let you move up and down in the form as you’d expect.
Our next choice in keys was much harder to make: how to use the “Enter” key. It’s widely used in many apps to complete an action, but is also used to add a line break to text. In a form, we feel it’s far more common to need to quickly complete an action than it is to need to write multiple paragraphs of text, so we chose to use the “Enter” key to validate and submit responses. If an answer does not validate, then the user is asked to correct their answer; otherwise, they’ll move onto the next question. Then, we used the common “Shift” + “Enter” shortcut for line breaks when writing multiple paragraphs of text, the same shortcut commonly used in chat apps like Facebook Messenger.
Ideally, though, users shouldn’t have to use “Tab” or manually scroll to navigate forms at all, even though the forms show only one question at a time. That’s why we designed the forms to auto-scroll to the next question as soon as the current question is answered. Most forms require you to scroll through to see all of the questions, or even click to other pages to continue the survey. Our approach keeps respondents focused on the conversation and makes it far quicker to fill in the form.
After deciding on the basics of our UI, we tackled interaction design as the next challenge. Our focus was a computer without a touchscreen, accelerometer, webcam or even a mouse. All that is needed to interact is a keyboard. After all, if you’re just answering questions, what more should you need?
After deciding on the basics of our UI, we tackled interaction design as the next challenge. Our focus was a computer without a touchscreen, accelerometer, webcam or even a mouse. All that is needed to interact is a keyboard. After all, if you’re just answering questions, what more should you need?
Traditionally, a typical form forces you to move back and forth between the mouse and keyboard. You’ll click in a text box to type something in, and then reach for your mouse or squint to tap on your smartphone’s screen to fill in a multiple-choice question. If the form doesn’t already look bad enough, then the rows of tiny bullet points should be enough to get respondents screaming for the hills.
As dated as it might sound in the age of smartphones and tablets, we decided that keyboard navigation would be central to our redesigned forms. Users have to use a keyboard for questions that need a typed answer anyway, so we added keyboard shortcuts for all other types of questions. For “Yes” or “No” questions, you would tap “y” for yes and “n” for no. For multiple-choice questions, each answer is assigned a letter. For ratings, respondents would tap the number corresponding to their rating, from 1 to 0 (ten).
Navigation between questions raised a new issue: the “Enter” key or the “Tab” key? How would these two buttons work in the context of Typeforms? At first, we allowed “Tab” and “Enter” to be used interchangeably to move to the next question, but assigning two buttons to do exactly the same thing seemed weird. So, we asked ourselves, what could we learn from what’s been done before?
In every other app or website, the “Tab” key is most commonly used to move between elements. You use it to jump between fields in a traditional form and to move between parts of a Web page. It is a non-committal way to move around. The “Enter” key, on the other hand, is most commonly used to commit to a decision. It’s the button we press to take an action or to submit a traditional form.
So, in learning from those who came before us, we decided to assign “Tab” for jumping between questions without setting off any validation checks. This way, you can move around the form without having to use the mouse. Pressing “Tab” brings the next question into view, ready to be filled out; “Shift” + “Tab,” in the same way, take you back to the previous question; and the arrow keys let you move up and down in the form as you’d expect.
Our next choice in keys was much harder to make: how to use the “Enter” key. It’s widely used in many apps to complete an action, but is also used to add a line break to text. In a form, we feel it’s far more common to need to quickly complete an action than it is to need to write multiple paragraphs of text, so we chose to use the “Enter” key to validate and submit responses. If an answer does not validate, then the user is asked to correct their answer; otherwise, they’ll move onto the next question. Then, we used the common “Shift” + “Enter” shortcut for line breaks when writing multiple paragraphs of text, the same shortcut commonly used in chat apps like Facebook Messenger.
Ideally, though, users shouldn’t have to use “Tab” or manually scroll to navigate forms at all, even though the forms show only one question at a time. That’s why we designed the forms to auto-scroll to the next question as soon as the current question is answered. Most forms require you to scroll through to see all of the questions, or even click to other pages to continue the survey. Our approach keeps respondents focused on the conversation and makes it far quicker to fill in the form.
Aug
07
Our original solution was Quickyform, a Flash-based contact form that ran on an iMac in the exhibition space. (You can still try it out today to get a feel of our first shot at re-imagining online forms.) It embodied the essence of the WarGames form even as a rough early prototype. Only one question was shown in focus at a time, and once a visitor filled it out and pressed “Enter,” the next question came into focus, ready for them to enter the next answer without having to click anywhere. This, we knew, was the first step in the right direction for the future of forms.
When we built Quickyform, Flash was still prevalent online, and there was lingering hope that Apple and others would adopt it for their mobile platforms. Flash has its uses, but it had quickly become obvious that it wasn’t the best tool for our needs. We quickly shifted to the modern languages of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and got to work designing a better UI that would work everywhere — ultimately, realizing our dream and even recreating the part of WarGames that had initially inspired us.
Our basic idea was to find the perfect way to display one question at a time, to reflect natural human conversation. To do that, we had to entirely declutter the UI, removing everything that might take the user’s attention away from the one question at hand. At the same time, we still wanted to retain a global view of the entire form to make it easy to navigate and see the remaining questions.
The solution wasn’t apparent at first. For example, an early version opened and closed each question as you went through them. That took care of showing only one question at a time, but the animations were too jarring and made it difficult to navigate the entire form. We took many such detours into the land of strange animations and interactions that just don’t feel natural in our quest to discover what would work best. The final simple solution of putting the active question in the center of the screen while showing the preceding and following questions faded out above and below seems obvious in retrospect but took a lot of experimenting to perfect.
Putting the active question in the center helped out other parts of our UI. It helped our large typography to make sense, which in turn freed us to make use of Web fonts. We use 24-pixel fonts on the desktop, and between 16- and 20-pixel fonts on mobile, depending on the device. Very few Web fonts work well at sizes below 16 pixels, so focusing on one question at a time enabled us to drastically improve the UI’s design.
In turn, the UI influences the UX. Large typography in our form designer forces you to shorten questions because there is less space per line. You have to make every word count in the questions you put in your form, and that precision makes the resulting questions far more likely to be answered by respondents.
Aug
07
There’s ways to make traditional forms better, by including more whitespace, separating forms into sections, and more. There’s standards behind the way forms look and feel, which have kept them far more similar to a paper form than something imagined just for screens. We wanted to experiment and see what a form could be like if it was removed from those linear constraints, redesigned around questions.
It wouldn’t be a traditional form, and it would even break conventions—much in the same way the iPhone’s software keyboard broke the standard real-button keyboard conventions—but the WarGames form had given us the idea that perhaps there was another way to gather info than the traditional form, and perhaps it could be better. We wanted to start out with a clean slate, and reimagine what a form could be with an entirely new product.
One our search for the holy grail of serving the right image to the user, our attitude towards browser makers until now has largely been, “Forget you — we’ll do it ourselves.” I’m certainly no exception. We were so attentive to responsive images and were exposed to all of the guesswork and trials that are not typically released to the public that we got impatient (rightfully so) and did it with JavaScript.
The difference between a CSS transition and a responsive image is, of course, how they degrade. If a CSS transition doesn’t work, who really cares? Your interface might be a little jumpy, but the experience as a whole won’t really suffer because your users will still be able to accomplish their goal and consume the content they need.
That really isn’t the case with images. How does a new image tag degrade? The img tag is so widely accepted that I couldn’t even find when the W3C recommended it as a standard, other than a small reference in the HTML 4.01 specification. Replacing or even expanding on the img tag would be like telling Frank Sinatra to wear a baseball cap instead of a fedora — you’ll get some pushback.
As responsive design grew in popularity and as the media through which users consume information became uncontrollable, we slowly realized that img by itself wasn’t going to cut the mustard. We started asking questions like, “What screen size is the user on?” and “What’s the pixel density of the screen?” These questions fuelled our image techniques until we realized that screen size and pixel density have absolutely no relationship to the amount of bandwidth available to serve up a huge high-definition image.
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