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Comment by twoshortwords | Hacker News Reader

This article comes off as hand-wavy. The crux of the argument, that "[t]op aligned labels have proven to be faster and easier to fill out than left or right aligned labels", is unsupported. The author supplies no links to research or other corroborating sources.

The graphic is a little misleading, too. Under "Top aligned labels", it says: "less vertical space". I initially understood that to mean that the form occupies less vertical space. It really means that the form leaves less vertical space below it.

I'm confused why they didn't consider other types of labels, especially for text boxes. For instance, the iPhone puts the labels inline with the form element. And placeholder text frequently replaces labels, anyway. How does that affect usage?

Interestingly, they don't follow their own advice. The comment form after the article uses right-aligned labels.

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Unfortunately, I've found articles on this site to be poorly articulated opinion pieces, written from broken premises and with incorrect information, rather than actual UX practice documentation. Comments that disagree and point out errors are routinely deleted; a response to the one comment of mine that has remained live included the line, "this is a blog, not a science lab." One of the differentiators of UX from art is that it can be tested, so I find the author's attitude professionally disappointing.

LukeW's seminal book, "Web Form Design" has an entire chapter (19 pages!) about label placement. Some notes:

This paper is cited as discussing a major eBay form design, explaining their methodology: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=106605571117736457...

This article is cited as having done the eye-tracking research for label placement: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2006/07/label-placement...

The chapter starts out with the note that "it depends" for your specific usage.

A summary of the results are available on his blog: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?504

He also discusses using inline labels on his blog: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?687

About 30 seconds into reading the article, I came to roughly the same conclusions as you. No references to primary research. Poor.

The sad thing is that many people accept what they read in blog posts that are widely retweeted. Critical thinking is such an important skill, I'm surprised how many people don't have it. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking )

What you are asking for is for the research to tell you how to think and to validate the idea for you. That's somebody else's work, not yours. So you are wanting them to think for you, instead of thinking about the idea on your own. That's not critical thinking.

Critical thinking involves using your own mind to think about an idea without research. Not many people can do this. Ideas are presented all the time. You either agree or disagree. If you are curious for evidence, then you do the research yourself. But don't agree or disagree on the basis that no research is presented, or on the basis that lots of research is presented. Either way is not critical thinking.

Comments that detract value or are off-topic are deleted. You can still disagree and add value, but unfortunately your motive so far has only been to detract value, which is professionally disappointing.

> Interestingly, they don't follow their own advice. The comment form after the article uses right-aligned labels.

Apologies, but these sorts of observations/criticisms are fairly common on HN (I remember someone saying "they don't follow their own advice" about the Stanford web credibility guidelines), and I have to say I consider them pointless. Observing hypocrisy and pseudo-hypocrisy is necessary if you're making a decision that depends heavily on someone's character, like electing a president, but it's almost always irrelevant when assessing the merit of what someone says.

People often have good reasons for not implementing their own advice, too. Maybe it was a higher priority for them to get the word out rather than make sure everything public they do complies with it first. Sometimes it's a cost-benefit problem: improving blog comment forms probably won't make much of a difference to their bottom line, but improving a new user sign-up form very well could. Comment forms are also fairly standard in what information they expect and in what order, so again, probably not a huge payoff. In Stanford's case, they already have the credibility that comes with being Stanford. Etc.

I the observation about the blog itself not using top-down alignment is not pointless I think. It really makes you wonder whether the post was written to increase a counter in a database or out of conviction that this is the way to go. And if there is a good reason for not making the change, the author could have been more respectful to the reader by offerring an explanation.

> It really makes you wonder whether the post was written to increase a counter in a database or out of conviction that this is the way to go.

Again, this just has no relevance to the claims on offer. You can evaluate them for yourself without wondering what the author's motives are.

I keep getting downvoted. I'm not sure why. My guess is that criticizing criticism of an article that a bunch of people find sketchy has made me a target for their low opinion of the article or site itself. This seems especially likely given that the only response to my original comment, which has been increasingly upvoted while mine have been downvoted, chooses to see the lack of top-aligned labels for the comments form as likely evidence that the article was authored for base motivations, or that the author doesn't really believe his own advice. This despite the fact that I offered several very plausible reasons why it would not count as such evidence. Here's another one, just for the hell of it: laziness.

I have no idea if the site is as sketchy as people claim, because I've never even heard of it before. But even if it is, I still wouldn't think the comment form comes anywhere close to giving unambiguous information about the author's motives. There are so many highly plausible reasons for this that you'd have to be thoroughly unreasonable to assume that it's strong evidence for any particular reason.

It's common here because it's important. This article was not reporting on a study with facts, they are proffering advice that they do not follow. I don't care why they didn't follow it, if you had time to make pretty graphics you have time to tweak and test the CSS on your site. Nor is this breaking news that the public needs to know at 3:48pm on Wednesday rather than 6pm on Friday.

Sometimes they are actually written well enough or are so misleading that you don't even notice these things. I went to this article looking for affirmation of my own opinion (I happen to agree with the headline) and thanks to confirmation bias did not notice the comment form, and might have even bookmarked it or sent it along. Thankfully someone saved me a future embarrassment by pointing out that it's worthless as evidence, which is a large part of why I read the HN comments...

Dieterrams, thank you. What you said is exactly right. The reason the comment form is the way it is is because I could not find the right css code to change it, as the site is a WP theme buried in code.

However, this is completely irrelevant to the idea in the article and does not take any merit off of it whatsoever. If you cannot judge an idea for the idea itself, what chance do you have at learning anything from anything you read?

"For instance, the iPhone puts the labels inline with the form element."

The 'placeholder' text is a new attribute of HTML5. It allows you to specify the 'inline text'. It's suppored in modern browsers.

Reference: http://diveintohtml5.org/forms.html

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