Customer Reviews

Fancy Form Design (Sitepoint)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The book is quite short, with large type, and pretty photos of very simple forms. It is about as realistic as Peter Pan. The forms are very very very very simple, so keeping the forms pretty and clean is a snap -- in the book. But what do you do with real-world forms that have lengthy, multi-line questions? Multi-part questions? Questions where part a changes what happens with part b and c?

I like Sitepoint publishers a lot, but I wasted my money on this book. Be advised.

This is a light weight book. Anyone other than a beginner might want to skip this book. It covers some basic information a beginner might find useful. It is not a book covering the many different ideas and concepts of form design and the size of the book reflexes that being only about 150 pages long. The book has just one extended example and not a particularly complex one. As for "Fancy" I think that is overstating the form design in the book. It is a solid, professionally design form, but one most developers already know how to create. For a beginner this might be one of many books to read. It is short and a fast read with several ideas and concepts a beginner should know.

I expected much better from SitePoint, but this book is just one extended example, and not an especially complicated one. Lots of space is taken up with repetitive code, and very little in examining a range of real-world challenges or alternative approaches to form design. Sorry I wasted my money on this one. I gave it two stars for covering material that might be useful to a beginner.

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Forms make money. People who make effective forms make good money.

The industry needs a lively book to bring together the best practices and lore of making seductive forms. Why do I use the term "seductive?"

If you make form-based Web application interfaces or Web sites for a living then you have encountered this problem: Your task is to collect, say, 10 pieces of information from a user who might rather be doing something else. In order to get these 10 simple bits of data, you may have to get the user to sift through hundreds, possibly thousands, of options. How do you do this without overwhelming the user? How do you flow each user seamlessly through pitfalls they are best left unaware of? How do you do this for complex, multi-screen workflow situations?

Beyond knowledge of markup, styling, graphics editing, programming and usability issues, we in the field also must practice ways to present all this to our co-workers and managers to insure the integrity of the final product.

This book presents the basics in a solid way but it's not going to get you very far with those interesting challenges.
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As I'm designing forms I don't usually have an issue making then usable or accessible within the limits of the clients budget.

However taking the form to the next level technically can sometimes be an issue. This is exactly what Fancy Form Design by Jina Bolton, Tim Connell and Derek Featherstone is all about, designing and building those great forms on the web.

When I first purchased this book, I was a little skeptical as to whether this book would have any content in it that would be relevant to me.

Yes the book doesn't deal with the interactive design issues of long forms, but frankly if you are a good design you will know not to make you forms long (like in the 1990's).

I was surprised. I was expecting a dry developer focused book on form design. It is not. This is a good book, well worth the 4-5 hour read. I found that it wasn't just one of those books you read once either, it's also a great reference book.

This book is focused on the front end developer or back end developer that wants to enhance their forms. Even a UX designer like me with hands on skills will get something from this book.

While I was reading this book I was constantly thinking, well that's great, but what about this accessibility or usability issue - yeah I can't help it. But you know not a one or two paragraphs later I was presented with the solution or consideration for those issues. It's great to see a practical book that is on same page as I am.

Interestingly the book layout parallels the way in which you design and develop an online form. The book itself walks you through a centralised case study for the development of a series of forms. Fancy Form Design is a book very heavy in code and visual examples as well, which makes it a very useful future reference tool.

The first section of the book deals with the planning phase of development, looking at the types of form elements, and the ways they are presently being enhanced on the web. It also looks at the usual competitive analysis process. Moving on to my favourite part the interaction design of the form, now it doesn't spend a lot of time in this area as there are some good books on the market already that handle this area in detail. There is a bit of a discussion on task flows, paper prototyping and wireframing (which I personally think we can do without).

The form design section of the book walks through the usual suspects, of the grid, typography, the use of colour and micro imagery to enhance a form's presentation. This section is about the graphical design only. It's the next section that walks you through the building of the form.

You then get to the bones of the matter, the development of the form structure. There are a good series of examples here on how to build a form correctly to overcome most of the common accessibility and usability issues. Basic issues such as the correct practice for use of labels, error messages, required fields and help text are reviewed and discussed with clarity here. This is an area you might think you know backwards, however it's always worth a review on these matters.

Now we have the structure of the forms it's time to use some CSS to style the final forms. Fancy Form Design walks you through the issues of using various resets and the various ways form elements render in different browsers (I'm looking at you IE) and ways to overcome them. I didn't expect to find anything new in this section, and I didn't, still your mileage may vary on this one.

The final chapter is on enhancing your forms beyond the stylised CSS/HTML layout with the help of jQuery.

This is the section I enjoyed the most in this book. It looked in detail at select menu, radio and checkbox styling as well as conditional question displays, date selectors, password strength indicators and a basic auto-complete. All this is presented in an easy to follow manner, which makes implementing these enhancements progressively on your forms, with jQuery, really easy. There is even a reminder about input validation, doing it on the client and server sides.

Only the downside, I personally think the last section of the form enhancement was a bit to short. I could have done with another 10-20 pages of additional enhancements to the case study in question. A little more detail on the jQuery level would have been good too.

Overall it's good book, entertaining, well written, not overly long, full of immediately practical examples that anyone familiar with form design and development can use. It's good to see more of these micro topic books being written than the large 500 page tomes of yesterday.

A rather small book with a very narrow focus this book deals specifically with how to make your form fields look and behave in a much fancier way than you get with the regular HTML form fields. Changing the appearance of form fields is actually one of the more complex aspects of CSS and for some fields you even need to use JavaScript to be able to get the form field to look and behave how you want.

This book goes into a reasonable level of detail on just what all the issues with cross browser styling of the various form fields are and how to overcome them. If making your forms look really fancy is what you are trying to achieve then this book will help you achieve it. Several of the JavaScript solutions it demonstrates preempt some of the new form fields proposed for HTML 5 so that you will eventually be able to replace the JavaScript with HTML.

Whether this book is worth getting depends on just how fancy you want to make the forms on your site. If you are happy to let the form fields look the way that the various browsers use by default then you don't need this book but if you want to make the fields take on a more standardised appearance that better bends into your site then the examples in this book should show you just what you need to do.

Seriously, for $20 bucks, you can find something else to entertain yourself with.

What the author calls a book is incredibly short, with no tips or tutorials or anything basically. It's just a pile of nothing on top of nothing.

The Author, Miz Jina Bolton, could use to learn web design from scratch as far as I'm concerned.

Fancy Form Design tells how to integrate a stylish form on a web site and shows how to create web forms that are both functional and works of art compatible across all major browsers. Web site designers will appreciate the fine survey of code, style, and JavaScript forms and will find the many examples packed with keys to working with better forms.