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In using eyetracking to evaluate the usability of search forms for my previous article for UXmatters, “Evaluating the Usability of Search Forms Using Eyetracking: A Practical Approach,” we discovered much interesting data. I’ll provide an in-depth analysis of that data here.

Please note that our ad-hoc test setup didn’t resemble real-world conditions. Since I had to properly measure saccadic activity and saccades times, I had to eliminate all elements that would force users to visually browse through the pages we used during testing.

We based our test setup on Luke Wroblewski’s article “Web Application Form Design.” Luke provided valuable insights and feedback during both our test preparation and results analysis. Thank you, Luke! Thus, we were able to subject Luke’s theories to usability testing and enrich them through the power of numeric data.

During the process of building the forms that we would test, we tried to respect Luke’s suggestions regarding the relationship between label placement and formatting and the type of form content—well-known data versus unfamiliar data that requires thought. Thus, you’ll find both types of data on each of the pages that we tested. To add some real-world flavor, we paired inputs fields for well-known data with other slightly more difficult form elements such as drop-down list boxes. Moreover, doing so helped us to confirm our previous findings about forms.

Our test subjects comprised both expert users—primarily designers and programmers, but also some usability experts—and novice users. We requested users to complete all of the forms that we presented to them. Our gaze-path recordings were complete once a user clicked the submit button.

Test 1: Left-Aligned Labels to the Left of Input Fields

“Excessive distances between some labels and their input fields forced users unnecessarily to take more time to interact visually with the form.”

This was the first case we tested, because it’s the most popular format in...