After reading the article Best Practices for Form Design by Salim Ansari, my knowledge and practices in UX design have been reinforced. The article emphasizes best practices in UX design that boost engagement and retention, and these should be applied to both mobile and desktop applications. These different components and design forms are not just suggestions or recommendations; they should be applied in the design to reduce user frustration.
The article specifically mentions components necessary when designs require users to fill out forms, such as an onboarding form to join the application's database. Here, Ansari discusses various components, such as a multi-step progress bar to help users visualize how far they are in the form, labels to indicate where information must be entered, placeholder text to guide users, and more.
In Spring Quarter 2025, I participated in a 6-week conceptual design sprint. During this sprint, my team and I were tasked to create a mobile application for families to track their histories and store memorabilia. During this process, we integrated many of the design practices suggested by Ansari. One major design practice we integrated and iterated on was the multi-step progress bar to help users visualize how many steps of the form remained. We experimented with presenting this information in two ways: the first was a single line in a lighter grey that would fill with the themed application color, and the second was a bubble format with three main steps that would fill in as the user continued through the form. Ultimately, we decided to use the former, the continuous line, as there were steps within steps, and users felt more motivated to continue as they saw continuous progress.