Working towards Usable Forms on the Worldwide Web: Optimizing Multiple Selection Interface Elements

Abstract

If an interactive form in the worldwide web requires users to select multiple answers from a given list, this can be implemented in several ways. This paper discusses an empirical study with n = 106 participants, where two interface elements for choosing multiple answers (checkboxes and list boxes) were compared. Results showed that participants chose the same amount of options in both conditions but were faster and more satisfied using checkboxes. The time differences disappeared after several trials, revealing a learning effect for the list box element. As a conclusion, it can be recommended that website developers and online researchers should use checkboxes instead of list boxes for their online forms and questionnaires to enhance usability and user satisfaction-at least for a smaller number of options.

User-friendly locations of error messages in web forms: Put them on the right side of the erroneous input field

“…Topics like cultural adaptability (Recabarren and Nussbaum, 2010), date entry field formatting (Bargas-Avila et al, 2011a;Christian et al, 2007;Couper et al, 2004), error message timing (Bargas-Avila et al, 2007), field format restrictions (Bargas-Avila et al, 2011c), label alignment (Das et al, 2008), multiple option selection ( Bargas-Avila et al, 2011b), mandatory field highlighting (Pauwels et al, 2009;Tullis and Pons, 1997), question types (Reja et al, 2003) and response option formats (Healey, 2007;Heerwegh and Loosveldt, 2002) have been subject to empirical evaluation. While there is an increasing number of empirical studies in this field, the topic of where an error message is best placed within a web form was rarely explored.…”

Constrained Wiki: The WikiWay to Validating Content

“…(The latter being a (simplification of a) real example coming from a recent Wikipedia trend of splitting away or removing oversized "in popular culture" sections) The presence of specific page elements can be verified against usability criteria too. For instance, it can be checked if forms, very common in wiki pages too, follow the rules discussed in [22] that suggests to use checkboxes instead of selection lists.…”

Designing usable web forms

“…These include topics such as error message improvement [2,5,29], error prevention [6,26], improvement of various form interaction elements [3,4,10,11], improvement for different devices [27], or accessibility improvement [23]. Some publications present empirical data, whereas others are based on best practices of experts in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience [18,19,31].…”