Design Secrets: The Lowly Text Field

Designing Clarity, Accessibility and User Effort in FileMaker

How much is there to consider about the lowly text field when designing a form?  Quite a lot, actually.

Consider the following traits:

  • Clear text labels
  • Short text labels
  • Proper field size
  • Visual focus for input fields
  • Input hints (think placeholder text)
  • When to how much helpful information
  • Accessibility
  • Font size (on desktop and mobile)
  • Properly sized tap areas (mobile)
  • Proper keyboard (mobile)
  • Pre-filled fields
  • Auto Complete
  • Auto Suggestion

Nick Babich explains each clearly and succinctly in his post at usplanet.org, and offers some widely accepted guidelines to follow, such a text size, contrast ratios for different text sizes, tap area sizes, and more. and plenty of visual Do and Don’t examples:texf fields

From the FileMaker perspective, many of these issues are addressed starting with FileMaker 12 themes, and the ability of a developer to fine tune text fields is pretty spectacular and easy to apply. Consider the options available for a text field:

  • Different settings for Normal, Hover, Pressed, In focus, and Placeholder text
  • Solid or gradient fill – or choose an image
  • Solid, dotted or dashed lines, with easily adjusted corner radii.
  • Inner and outer shading
  • Padding
  • Alignment
  • Line spacing, line spacing and tabs

And all of this is available via professionally designed themes, and any changes are easy to apply to either a single layout or to a the whole solution.

Combine these tools with the guidelines in this article, and there is simply no excuse for making a poor looking, ineffective form.

Read the whole thing and bookmark it.

Source: Designing Perfect Text Field: Clarity, Accessibility and User Effort — UX Planet

Featured Image credit: thinkwithgoogle

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