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Design guidelines
Design guidelines

Forms

Guidelines for creating user-friendly forms.

Use the pre-built form components

For user-friendly, consistent forms, your best bet is to use and combine our App UI Kit form components, which have a lot of common accessibility features built in. These include:

  • Form controls:
    • Select
    • Checkbox
    • RadioGroup
    • SegmentedControl.
  • FormField (can be combined with any form input or control to provide consistent layout and accessibility features).
  • Inputs:
    • TextInput
    • NumberInput
    • MultilineInput.
  • FileInput (form component supporting file upload).

Don't rely on placeholders

Placeholders can be a useful way to indicate expected values, but:

  • They aren't as prominent as labels.
  • They aren't visible when inputs have focus.

Always use placeholders in addition to labels.

Correctly assign labels to inputs

It's not enough to visually associate a label with an input. You must add an id to the input and the for (in HTML) or htmlFor (in JSX) attribute to the label:

<label htmlFor="email">Email</label>
<input type="text" id="email" />
tsx

This ensures that:

  • Clicking the label will focus the field.
  • Screen readers can understand the form.

Use checkboxes and radio buttons appropriately

Checkboxes and radio buttons appear similar, but they serve different purposes:

  • Use checkboxes when the user should be able to select any combination of options.
  • Use radio buttons when the user should only be able to select one option.

Show error states

If the user enters or submits an invalid value, show the input in an error state.

If it's not obvious why an error is occurring, show an error message beneath the input. To learn how to write effective error messages, see Errors & messaging.