Registration forms are the gatekeepers of your web site - they can allow or deny users access to your most interesting content. Good registration forms can allow the highest volume of most qualified users, but poor ones can either allow in riff-raff or deny good prospects (or both).

Linda Bustos at Get Elastic wrote an excellent post: Registration Usability - 87 Registration Forms Tested. I can’t beat the quality of her analysis, but I do want to discuss one aspect of registration form design: Garbage in, garbage out.

There are two basic problems you must address when designing a form: problems of type and problems of quality.

Problems of type

These problems occur when data is entered into the wrong field; for example, an address is entered into a business name field. These problems can be easily addressed through affordances, constraints and visual grouping.

Visual grouping
Problems of type can be reduced through visual grouping; putting similar fields together and making visual breaks between these fields.

Affordances and Constraints
When a piece of information like a phone number or a credit card number has a specific format, constrain the entry fields to the format of the data. The “size” attribute in HTML can also limit the number of characters entered in a field, like 3 digits for a phone number area code.

If a user can enter data in any format, they will. A country can be “U.S.A.”, “USA”, “US”, “America” and so on. If the data must be consistent, offer a selection of choices, but don’t allow users to format the selection. Drop-down menus and combination boxes are good for this.

Update: SEOmoz.org points out a form with last name first, followed by first name. WTF? Keep the fields in common order. Country then state then city then address? Um, no.

Problems of Quality

Inaccurate data entry, typos and spelling mistakes can have severe consequences on the quality of the data, including having email addresses that don’t work due to a typo. The majority of quality problems come from slips - accidental and unconscious mistakes in data entry.

There are several ways to catch slips and other problems. Allowing a user to preview their entry before submission and showing a confirmation afterwards are two ways; validation (JavaScript, etc.) is another way - this is a good way to catch problems of type.

The data you collect is only as good as the data a user enters.

Update: SEOmoz.org highlights a form with absolutely abysmal data collection here. Sigh.

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Hasbro and Mattel, the owners of the Scrabble game, are trying to shut down Scrabulous, one of the most popular games on Facebook and a direct rip-off of Scrabble. Much has been said about whether this is a good move of not by a company trying to protect its trademark and whether this will be a public relations disaster in the name of patent protection.

3 things to note

• Scrabble is one of the most popular board games of the last few generations with no sanctioned online version
• Scrabulous is bringing in new fans to Scrabble
• These fans are buying the physical game

Naturally, a Facebook Group has been created to try to save Scrabulous (called Save Scrabulous - go figure). As of 3:20 this afternoon, the group has 8850 members. The group is growing too fast and too big for Hasbro/Mattel to ignore. We saw last month how the Facebook group Fair Copyright for Canada contributed to delaying a piece of legislation in the Canadian legislature; can the groundswell of Facebook users influence a multinational corporation?

Hasbro outlines its position:

SCRABBLE has been entertaining millions of people around the world for 60 years so we are not surprised that fans have thoroughly enjoyed playing Scrabulous on Facebook.com. What consumers may not realize, however, is that Scrabulous is an illegally copied online version of the world’s most popular word game, the copyrights and trademarks for which are owned by Hasbro in the U.S. and Canada and Mattel in the rest of the world. We encourage fans to continue to lay down online tiles at sites that have legally licensed the interactive rights to host SCRABBLE fun. (bold is mine)

Remember - there is no online arena for Scrabble. Plus, Hasbo misses the point by a mile: players don’t care about licensing. They care about the game. Matthew Ingram says: “…how people interact with your brand is pretty much up to them, not you. If you’re smart, you will be glad they are interacting with it at all, and you will find a way to capitalize on it.”

Will Hasbro clue in and join the new millennium by embracing Scrabulous or will they demonstrate a RIAA-like inability to adapt to new market conditions? Can the mobilization of the Facebook army Save Scrabulous?

(3:45 and the group has 9200 members: 350 members in 25 minutes? Pay attention, Hasbro)

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For the typographers, here are some samples from Lettering by Thomas Wood Stevens. Lettering is a hand-lettering textbook published in 1916.

In the days of digital design, it’s great to see these hand-drawn samples of typefaces. The craftsmanship and precision is wonderful to see, and the book is a wonderful read for those learning about type and designing and drawing typefaces. Used copies can be found on Amazon, etc.

Calson Oldstyle from American Type Foundries (from the original matricies).

Cloister Oldstyle with a nice c-t ligature and alternative Q.

Variations on letter shapes (note the square slab serifs in the last example). I love this - taking the same basic typeface and doing all kinds of variations on it.

Cover of The International Studio magazine. Wow.

Speechless.

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The New Year’s Day slaying of Stefanie Rengel and the subsequent (and inevitable) Facebook tribute page once again shows that the law cannot keep up with the social developments and implications of the Internet and especially Facebook. Facebook, and social networking in general, is redefining how society interacts on the Internet, and how the law cannot keep up with these new social definitions.

The Toronto Star’s article “Gag orders in the Facebook age” quotes:

The Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) prohibits the publication of information “… if it would identify the child or young person as having been a victim of, or as having appeared as a witness in connection with, an offence committed or alleged to have been committed by a young person.”

The key here is “the publication of information”.  The article goes on to state:

[…] while media outlets are prohibited from naming the victim and the youths charged, their names and faces are all over Facebook.

“It’s a very good question if the people who post things on Facebook are actually breaking the YCJA,” Peel Const. Wayne Patterson said. “I guess it all boils down to whether Facebook is eventually determined by somebody that it is a publication.”

Alain Charette, media relations spokesperson for the Department of Justice, said the restriction “does apply to the Web, including Facebook … generally publication covers a very wide spectrum.”

Facebook is not a newpaper article, or a publication in the traditional sense. Facebook represents social processes digitally, in this case, mourning. It’s our virtual meeting grounds, not a series of published articles or blog posts. It’s as if a group of Stefanie’s friends got together on the sidewalk on which she was slain but could not mention her name as they were talking about her life.

So, is Facebook a publication? Just because something is on the Internet, is it published? Technically yes, but is that the intention? This blog posting is published, and is intended to be a publication, but the group I create on Facebook is not intended to be a publication.

Our society is being redefined in this digital age. The law, as usual, lags behind.

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