Interaction design for forms

[sarawilcox]

Back in 2019, we identified that good form design covers:

• interaction design - making the form easy to use (patterns and components)
• content design - making it easy to understand and answer (questions and other content)
• service design - making it easy for the user to get things done (process)

But we only ever addressed the 2nd of these - in our guidance on How to write good questions for forms.

[sarawilcox]

Some of the things we didn't address in the content style guide were:

• letting users give you information their way
• using familiar patterns
• choosing which component to use
• putting interactive elements where users expect them
• giving users a sense of control, for example with task lists

[cjforms]

This is good. I hope it comes up the priority at some point

[baracoffice]

Referring here to a discussion about the use of the status tags in the Task List (by @cjforms )

Regarding @cjforms comment about the status "looking like a button" - I'm exploring having both the link and the status clickable - as a way for the user to get back into the application form. I am concerned that in some other settings, clicking on a "tag" would bring you to a collection of items using that tag, and that the pattern for the status elements is the same as that for tags. However, It might be that the affordance is strongly enough contextualised, so that in the task list it's clear that one can click and proceed, whereas in a "tag" setting, eg a search interface, it would be clear that clicking on a tag would give you all items tagged with that word. Also, the addition of a # to the word or phrase might be enough of a differentiator