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Comment by josekpaul | Hacker News Reader

I really like gridforms for dense data-entry forms (http://kumailht.com/gridforms/).

Kumail Hunaid, who made Grid Forms, is also the creator of Flakes.

I don't like them at all. Yes, they look pretty, but it's an emulation of the worst aspects of paper forms. The grid-style form is my least-favourite paper form and I frequently find it confusing and difficult to fill out such forms correctly. Perhaps this is because the linear flow of the form is awkwardly two-dimensional, or perhaps because for anything beyond a trivial example, the layout becomes unnatural as the size of the fields don't usually lend themselves to a logical and human-friendly structured layout.

Perhaps it's because the grid style form ignores the importance of whitespace in clear and understandable design. Here's a good test: hold the form upside down and see if you can still tell it's structure at a glance, or hold it at the other side of the room and try the same thing.

Be that as it may, this is exactly the type of form I routinely see people filling out on 80s-era WYSE terminals at airports, rental car agencies, the DMV, hardware stores, and so on. It seems like a lot non-tech people find them fairly easy to get the hang of.

What evidence do you have that people find it easy? My experience with such forms is that people make mistakes constantly. Just because awful forms are common doesn't make them easy. I'd argue that there are many easier styles of form.

Old terminals were fairly space-constrained so I can understand why this choice was made, but modern computers with their high-res screens do not have this restriction, e.g the iPhone has a full keyboard instead of a number pad with letters on, like feature phones had, because they had the space to do so.

Speaking of the iPhone, input forms in iPhone apps are more or less grid style.

Having worked in places where AS/400 terminals where the norm I'd argue that "non-tech people" don't so much as get the hang of it, as rote learn the system and then moment they step out what they have learnt fail miserably to recover. I've experienced push-back on updates to programs that take a five step process back to one or two simply because the person actually using the software didn't understand what typing the commands did and they weren't will to learn the new method.

Agreed, was coming in here to comment on as much. I don't think anything on the demos really stood out quite as much as the grid forms does. It's closer to what people who might be replacing a paper form would probably like.

Whenever I'm designing a system that is replacing paper, though it's been a long while. I find it best to start with as close to the paper version as practical. There's a lot to be said for making something that is familiar.

Was coming here to say the same earlier, but I liked it so much I've now hacked together a sweet DSL to use it with my React form library.

Rendering demo: http://insin.github.io/newforms-gridforms/

DSL example: https://github.com/insin/newforms-gridforms#usage

"With grid forms, lengthy forms can easily fit above the fold. Which means less scrolling. "

Seems like a bad idea to me whenever designs attempt to "Fit stuff above the fold". Scrolling is a lot better, and I think it's better to present users with a portion of the information at a time and allow them to progress through a long form in a linear fashion. Vertical scrolling > horizontal progression.

I tend to like typeform more, for anything form-like. (http://www.typeform.com/)

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