In an earlier post,  I highlighted Luke Wroblewski and his suggested approach to real-time form feedback.  Providing inline validation can prove to be a small-win for site designers as it eliminates purchase barriers and fosters users through the perceptually obtrusive task of form completion.  Amazingly enough, it’s often the small design tweaks that result in the biggest gains for both the user and the brand.

Prior to writing, Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (released May 2008), Wroblewski asked friend, Jared Spool, for an example where a change in design paid dividends for the business.  Spool responded, “You mean like $300 million of new revenue?”  Continuing to share his story, Spool speaks of a major eCommerce site and a simple design improvement to their checkout process that paid the business approximately $45 million in the first month and $300 million the first year following implementation.  Simply put, a checkout experience that many deemed user-centric and easy, was a roadblock for visitors and resulting in site drop-off.  Informed by usability testing, designers were able to target the culprit — a pesky button!!  As Spool chronicles, it’s during the most critical times (in this instance, form completion) that the small wins can pay the greatest dividends.

Visit http://bit.ly/1p3MEk for Spool’s full account.

Luke Wroblewski, Senior Director of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc., is all about small wins when it comes to designing site experiences.  He is a design technician who handles his site visitors with a very humanitarian approach.  Simply said, he cares about his users.  In his article, Inline Validation in Web Forms, Wroblewski addresses supporting user interactions through real-time form feedback.  Wroblewski, with London-based usability firm, Aramys, tested the effectiveness of Inline Validation against the more typical “Submit-and-refresh” system response.

Wroblewski summarizes his results and writes, “Our participants were faster, more successful, less error-prone, and more satisfied when they used the forms with inline validation.”  But, Wroblewski and company didn’t stop there.  After establishing a direct relationship between improved user-satisfaction and inline validation, the team tested five different inline validation executions and summarize findings into usage and design technique recommendations.

Check out this article and others at Luke’s site, Luke W: Interface Designs.  Unlike a lot of other speakers in the UI/UX field, he’s not full of hot-air.  The dude is a proven designer and knows his stuff.  More importantly, he seems like a genuinly nice guy.