Workshop. Birthday selector to inline validation: Everything you need to know about web forms

Nobody wakes up in the morning hoping to finally create a new account that day. Web forms don't have a decent reputation, and rightfully so. Very often they are inaccessible and difficult to use, with awkward live validation and notorious error messages; not to mention painful dropdowns like a country selector, a birthday date-picker starting from 2020, a tiny newsletter checkbox, a disabled copy-paste for email verification, disabled "submit" buttons and horrendously evil CAPTCHAs in the disguise of street signs and crosswalks.

Whenever a customer will interact with the interface, it will happen via some sort of web form. In this workshop, we'll learn common pain points that customers experience way too frequently, how to solve them, and how to create an interface that excels at getting the information from the customer in a way that's friendly, accessible, and obvious — helping conversion and business KPIs along the way.

Let's get to the bottom of it. In this workshop, Vitaly Friedman, UX consultant and creative lead behind Smashing Magazine, will be taking a microscopic examination of common components and smart design patterns in web forms — on desktop and mobile. We'll study 100s of hand-picked examples — all of them will be coming from user research and usability studies of real projects — proven to work or fail in practice.