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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

This is not correct, the eye is optimized for side to side motion, and does it really really fast.

Up down motion takes longer.

Additionally the visual span is sufficient for someone to read the label, and see the box at the same time.

Another issue is context switches. With top to bottom motion there are a lot of context switches (to borrow a computing term), you switch from label, to entry.

If they are in columns it's much faster - the left side is all labels, the right is all entries. It's organized and faster.

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The time taken to fill the form is dominated by the time it takes a user to understand the field label and fill the input box. I think UX people use the term 'cognitive load' to describe the effort taken to understand. This paper presents research that shows that vertically aligned labels cause less cognitive load on users, resulting in faster form entry: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2006/07/label-placement...

any evidence for these claims?

This article http://www.iovs.org/cgi/content/full/50/3/1158 implies that vertical saccades are less accurate than horizontal saccades.

I could not find direct measurements of the vertical vs horizontal velocity in the few minutes I searched, but you can try it for yourself.

Try rapidly flicking your eyes left-right, then try up-down. At least for me left-right is much faster.

Edit:

http://elmar-inc.com/Papers/Clinical/SaccadesInChildren.pdf has a graph that clearly shows that horizontal saccades are faster.

If the whole form were horizontal, I'd see how that makes sense.

But the entire form is vertical.

With labels on the left, your eye has to scan down the form to the next field, over to the label, then back to the field. With labels above, it just has to scan straight down the form.

> This is not correct, the eye is optimized for side to side motion, and does it really really fast.

> Up down motion takes longer.

That's why upper labels win. You are able to scan the kind of data is required faster.

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