Usability of Comment Form Design
February 21, 2009 – 14:17 by Dani Iswara. Words count: 305.Usability in the meaning of common sense may vary in comment form designs. This note is about users experience against simple to fancy comment forms.
Here are some common comment form:

Figure 1. Default comment form design by Blogspot.

Figure 2. Default comment form design by WordPress.

Figure 3. Default comment form design by Drupal.

Figure 4. Fancy and beauty comment form design by tentangrifai.com (has changed now).
Principals and technical guidelines of comment form design
Common principals and technical guidelines of comment form design based on accessibility, usability, and user (Dani Iswara .Net) experience:
- For accessibility reason, especially for an aural agent, use
fieldset,legend,label(sometimes usability has a conflict with accessibility). - Usually,
labelplaced close (above) to theinputfields. - Comment form is in the same page of single post.
- Common order
- Comment author’s details (name, mail, URI [uniform resource identifier]), followed by comment, subscribe to comment, and submit button.
- Comment, comment author’s details, subscribe to comment, submit button.
- For the complex forms, use
tabindexin everyinputcodes for easy tabbing forms. Blog comment forms usually do not need this. - Name and mail fields are required (which is marked).
- Mail must not be published!
- URI is not only a website or weblog. We can use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn links, etc.
- Left aligned is more readable (in case of left to right direction; except Arabian).
- Still accessible with disable
- Cascading Style Sheets (CSS),
- images,
- javascripts,
- flashes.
Which principal is ideal for you? Which comment form is easier to use when using desktops, mobile devices, or aural agents?
More reading:
- Accessible form guidelines, the do’s & don’ts of accessible form design.
- Fancy form design using CSS.
Last updated: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 at 7:53
Comment by Dani Iswara on June 18, 2009 at 08:00:12
using Mozilla Firefox 3.0.11 on Gentoo Linux
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tabindex,