Form Design Tip: Caption Top

One of the first tasks that a new customer goes through when starting to use SmartForm Composer is the design of a cust0m template and stylesheet. And one of the first decisions that most customers grapple with is: “Should the captions  go above or to the left of the fields?”

At Avoka, our form designers have a very strong opinion on this – captions should always go above the field. There are a whole lot of really good reasons for this, including factors such as optimum layout, readability and accessibility, and form refactoring. In fact, we believe this so strongly, that all of the “off-the-shelf” stylesheets available in Composer use caption-top placement.

However, it’s not just our opinion. Or in fact, anyone’s opinion. There is a significant body of empirical research that supports this position. I’m not going to repeat all this information in this blog, but rather point you at an excellent blog from a colleague and independent expert in form design, Jessica Enders.

http://formulate.com.au/articles/alignment/

We strongly encourage anyone embarking on a form standardization project to take notice of this research, and use caption-top alignment.