When it comes to tailoring user experiences, you want to strike a balance between looking good but staying out of the user’s way.
It’s really easy to lean too heard in either one direction – on one end, you end up with nothing but glittery cursors and on the other end, you end up with a site that looks like it’s from the 90′. So whenever I come across a plug-in that claims it improves the user experience, I’m hesitant to adopt.
Such is the case with Sliding Labels.
Sliding Labels is a jQuery plug-in that places form element labels inside of their related inputs (rather than above them), and then – as described – slides them out of the field whenever it gains focus.
It’s subtle, but I dig it.
What kinds of things do you guys use in your web projects?
Andre Barnes says
Great post Tim. Short, sweet and simple!
Nick Shoemaker says
This is nice.
I use the Contact Forms 7 WordPress plugin on all my sites. It’s simple enough for a beginner, with enough advanced options to keep me interested.
I was wondering if this is something I can use with that? If so, where would I put all the scripts?
This is my contact page now:
http://nickshoe.org/contact
Tom says
Based on your page structure, you’d need to change the elements above your inputs to label elements.
You can drop the scripts anywhere you want on your server as long as you properly reference them in script tags in the markup.