The Ticket Gate That Had to Work in Half a Second
Wei Lin talks to the designer of a metro ticket gate about crowd flow, the beep nobody hears, and why half a second of delay turns a station into a queue.
A Form That Does Not Make You Feel Stupid
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Show notes
Forms, kindness and error messages
Most people meet a product's personality in its forms. Wei Lin spends this solo episode on the small decisions that make a form feel calm or hostile, using a hospital registration screen she redesigned for a Singapore clinic, where the old version made elderly patients give up halfway.
- Ask one thing at a time, and why that is not slower
- Writing an error message that blames the system, not the person
- Labels above fields, and the research behind it
- Default values that respect how people actually live
- What changed in completion rates after the redesign
Five practical rules you can apply to any form this week.
Transcript
Welcome back to Tap Target, I am Wei Lin Tan, and today it is just me and a subject I care about more than is reasonable: forms. Everyone has met a form that made them feel stupid. Red text, a field that cleared itself, a date format nobody uses. Last year I redesigned the registration screen at a clinic where elderly patients were giving up halfway through, and I want to share what we learned, step by step. Why we ask one question at a time. How we rewrote every error message so it blamed the system, not the person. Where the labels went and why. And the completion rate before and after, which still makes me a little emotional. Five rules by the end. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.
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