Label alignment in forms

Once in a while an article author writes his silver bullet and receives fame, money, power and girls from it… well… sort of :-)

My most read creation is without a doubt the 2006 article, appeared on the US web magazine UXmatters, Label placement in forms: I prepared an experimental set-up to test different types of forms using eye-tracking technology and reported my findings in the article.

Well, not only it’s the most read article ever on UXmatters; it attracted more than 100 comments and it’s a top referenced article when speaking about form designs: the findings were largerly included in the 2007 book “Web form Design” by Yahoo Chief Design Architect, Luke Wroblesky.

Recently the nice people at UXmatters have been so kind to prepare an article for their column “Ask UXmatters” were my findings were hilighted again with contributes by highly experienced UX people such as Michael Griffith—User Experience Director at Hewlett-Packard or Whitney Quesenbery-Past-President, Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA).

Some of them do agree with me, some others don’t. But that’s not the point (I’m always happy when people disagree with me, because that is the point were the discussion starts). The fact is that I’m really re-energized to work at a brand new article on form design tested using eyetracking technology and something new might come out in the forthcoming months.

Frontiers 2010 social kick-off

Frontiers of Interaction 2010 Social Kick-Off

Update: the kick-off was great; we had the whole venue packed with creative and innovative minds that provided us with great suggestions and suberbous content; we also had a nice chance to try the usage of Google Wave both to record what we said (thanks to Folletto and Dario for this) while people at home could interact “live” but it also let the discussion continue in the following days.
If you’re curious we have a bunch of photos on Flickr and – if you can speak Italian – here’s the answers of some of our guests to the question “What is Frontiers of Interaction for you?”. Enjoy.

Next Thursday, December 17th, at 6pm we’ve organized a social gathering to introduce the 2010 edition of Frontiers of Interaction conference (note: the conference on innovation and technology I co-founded and co-produce) in Milan (Italy) at the CreacityGate (here’s the map) provided by the nice guys at 2Lifecast.

How this edition is going to differ from the previous? how can we enhance the conference format? Which venue are we going to choose (and, most of all, in which city?) How could we strengthen interaction between speakers and the public?

We’re plenty with such questions; and the gathering will be a great chance to help us provide the proper answers.

If you’re in Milan next week don’t miss it!

Free wi-fi in Italy

Story 1: My parents recently returned from a trip to the Greek islands. We’ve been able to arrange a Skype video chat nearly every night at aperitif time: every bar had a free wifi connection. Every bar.

Story 2: my friend Gianfranco Chicco recently returned from a 6 month stay in Amsterdam (he’s the PICNIC conference marketing manager) and his main problem in Milan (!!) was to find open wifi networks (let me stress it: not FREE networks. OPEN. He was ready to pay for a connection.

How could you explain this?

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