Usable Forms

One of the projects that I’ve “parachuted” into has been a redesign of a tool that produces forms.  Forms are used for many things, and at PH they are used mostly for data input from nurses, doctors, patients, and more.  Today I ran across a book in progress by Luke Wroblewski called Web Form Design Best Practices. 

The book has its own site http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/webforms/, and while checking that out I ran across this slideshow from Aaron Gustafson’s Learning to Love Forms talk at WebVisions 2007: 

Getting Busier

The forms tool redesign is still moving along – I wrote a survey and sent it out to some forms users.  Three responses so far – now I have to decide how long to keep it up, or if I should send it out to others, or go with what I have.

Helped J.O. on a minor navigational question on a Med Recon form.

Did an expert review of a redesign of a directory.

Also did a short user interview and expert review of a Tumor Board meetings form.  Still working on that one – I’ll be talking with radiologists who also use that tool next.

It’s been very interesting working with the developers, getting to know their communication styles, and them getting used to having a usability designer as part of their process.  So far I’ve been “parachuting” in on these projects, but with the radiologist component of the tumor board I’ll be a bit closer to the beginning of the redesign.

We’re pretty well set up now with Morae – had a web tutorial on it last week, and on UserVue today.  We also purchased two webcams (Logitech Pro5000’s), and two Sony lapel mics.

Upcoming topics of interest include the pattern library, UI standards, and more UX training.  So far, so good.