Improving drupal forms

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culfin's picture
Posted by culfin on July 19, 2009 at 9:11am

Hi everybody,

a few days ago I spotted a very nice idea from the user hunvreus, who worked out a nice method to beautify drupal forms.
He describes this as a basic idea which has to be improved more:

The popup script works fine but need a bit of customization to take textareas, radios and checkboxes into account, the behavior could be improved to take the field focus into account, the style of the popup could be improved as well...

In my opinion, this would great addition because you find form elements everywhere in Drupal (Login/Registering or CCK fields for example).

Some things that have to be added:

- Allowing to show form fields descriptions as tooltips (box floating above the content)
- Appearing when a form field gains focus
- Themable tooltip
- Works with all types of fields (textarea, text field, radio and checkbox)
- Degrades properly without Javascript

I asked hunvreus if he would do this as a module so everybody could benefit from it.
So if some people agree with this idea we could create a chipin for this and collect some money. (I asked him about that and an amount about 330$ would be realistic to get this job done.)

What do you think about this? Do you have additional suggestions?

Best regards,

Andreas

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Comments

Tab into field

Posted by cattlecall (not verified) on July 22, 2009 at 4:23pm
cattlecall's picture

I like the concept for displaying the help info as a pop-up, but I think the design would benefit if the trigger wasn't the form field itself but instead was a help icon to the side of the field. I think of a form field as a place for entering data but not as a trigger for revealing help text.

Many users navigate through forms without touching a mouse, but instead by clicking the tab button. I'd find it distracting to my task of filling out the form (and in general a usability detriment) if a tool tip popped-up every time a field came into focus. I feel that in most instances help tips are more useful as an opt-in feature as they are usually supplementary to the task.

The functionality is also hidden from the user. If I visited a form page with such functionality and first reviewed all the fields before filling out the form (as some users do) then there would be no way instantly visible to me to learn about a field if I wanted help text - I'd have to be instructed first or discover on my own that I need to roll my mouse over a field to find out more information.

Don't get me wrong - the solution has it's strengths but I'd be more likely to use it for a corner case than on every form I create.

This might be interesting

Posted by keesje on October 28, 2009 at 9:46am
keesje's picture

This might be interesting too: http://drupal.org/project/form_tooltips

Kees

Dekbedovertrek webshop Damai en Beddinghouse