Thread:Talk:Style guide/Forms/Awesome/reply (2)

+ 1

my new nickname for you: formasaurus. happy to see this work is happening (it's gotten lost in the mix before). it's no small undertaking and i think your first article will already prove useful to community devs. yay!

a couple suggestions for consideration:
 * i didn't go through the entire doc, but you could really pull it all together if you show a couple examples of complete forms that illustrate successful use of your guide and principles, whether from wikipedia (HA! maybe you could use the link dialog or upload wizard) or elsewhere. if you wanted to go one step further, you could pull from a poorly designed form, apply the principles, and show the wp-style-guide-ified results.
 * assuming this is the start of a larger guide (because that would be *awesome*), i imagine most people will use it as a reference or when looking for explicit direction on conventions or specific styling, but i like that you pull in some larger design principles that aren't just specific to wikipedia forms, say. i think you're trying to achieve two things 1) provide guidance that will increase the sites consistency and make it easier for mediawiki developers to maintain or update (a wikipedia style guide) and 2) help mw developers create tools, gadgets, extensions that are more user-friendly than they, er, sometimes are (a general/web style guide).  as the guide develops, it would be nice to separate these out.  your article has a tone of there being only one right way to do something - which is appropriate for part 1) but not as much for part 2).  for part 2) i think it's important to stress there are typically multiple ways to achieve a desired behavior or effect.  so while human tendency is to group things that are in close proximity to each other, we also, as you know, use similarity (color, font), common fate (drop downs), figure/ground (action item, buttons, etc).  but i wouldn't assume everyone reading this knows they have these options at their fingertips.

exciting. looking forward to the next installments.