Best practices when making service requests

[Tim Schmitt]

Best practices when making service requests

We've been working on moving our old services that were built with an different service request tool into RequestCenter and were wondering if anyone had any thoughts about best standards or practices for the new forms that they would be willing to share.  For example, one such standard might be that the customer - initiator information will always be displayed at the top of the request.

Are there any other standardizations you could share that help lend consistency and provide improved readability for request forms?  Maybe someone has a design framework guide they would be willing to share?

Thanks!

Tim

[David Lucey]

We are still working on our design guide, but I can recommend an excellent book: Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski, it is a fantastic best practice guide for forms. http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/webforms/

Dave

[Keith Berlin]

Tim,

We haven't been developing services in RequestCenter, very long, and the best practices guidelines you're seeking are a great idea.

I've decided to always put the customer- initiator form on the bottom.  My theory is, the customer doesn't typically need to figure out who they are, so why consume valuable screen space with that information at the top (more information relevant to the customer is apparent when the form loads, without needing to scroll down the page).

Another thing I

[Jeanette Day]

We worked with our Web Usability team to develop a "Standards and Guidelines" document for our service designers (we have a pool of approximately a dozen designers). The "Standards" section governs items that have to be on all request forms - order of information on the form (ex. Customer-Initiator always at bottom), naming conventions, use of acronyms, forecasting method, etc. This is to ensure that the user experience is similar regardless of the service they are ordering or who designed the service fo

[Chris Morris]

We also put the customer-initiator info on the bottom of the page.  The customer should be presented with the stuff that they need to take action on at the top of form.  For example, items that need to be filled out, etc... 

[Tim Schmitt]

Thanks for the comments and the book suggestion.

We've been placing the customer information at the top because wanted the customer to review the information before subbmitng the form.  Our LDAP data is somewhat spotty and we want to make sure we have the right information when the form is submitted but I can see the advantages to placing it at the bottom as well.  I'll have to think that over more.

Does anyone find tha certain fields work better than others?  For example, we've not had much