Best Free jQuery Form Plugins to Improve User Experience

Link : http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/best-free-jquery-form-plugins-to-improve-user-experience

Webpage forms are quite commonplace for a number of different purposes. Some examples include user registration, e-commerce checkouts, profile settings, or even contact forms. Input fields are much easier to style with modern CSS3 techniques – but what about improving the overall user experience?

In this post I want to showcase a number of free open source jQuery plugins to help developers create easier web forms. Visitors want to fill out forms quickly and without much hesitation. You don’t want too many flashy page elements distracting from the task at hand. Think of these additional features more like guidelines to help users fill out forms concerning unique or unfamiliar content.

jQuery Autotab

Auto-tabbing is a nifty feature which could be developed from scratch. If you would rather save time then check out this great plugin to streamline that functionality. jQuery Autotab will detect when a field has hit its maximum length and automatically move onto the next defined element in the form list.

All of the inputs are built using a long selector string in jQuery where you separate each field by commas. I would love to see this plugin work dynamically based on each field’s tabindex attribute, instead of manually defining each element. There are also cool filters you can utilize for different inputs such as numeric telephone numbers or alphanumeric street addresses. Grab a copy from the official Github repo to see how this plugin works in action.

Pickadate.js

A little while ago I wrote an article detailing various date picker plugins for jQuery. The list includes a number of great choices but I miss one great solution named pickadate.js. This is a free open source plugin to use in any website project which just so happens to support mobile responsive web browsers. Pickadate allows users to pick not just a date, but also a specific time or range of times which need to be passed into the form.

Try skimming my other article if you have the time just to see what else is out there. I really love toying with pickadate.js because of the support for almost every mobile device. This doesn’t completely sell the plugin on its own, but also consider the beautiful interface which is very intuitive for first-time users. If you need a quick jQuery plugin for date selection I would suggest starting from here and branching out as you have the opportunity.

Progression.js

Have you ever seen guided forms which follow the user along to each input field? These can be created manually through hidden text elements or tooltips. But you may also choose to include a plugin such as Progression which can work in a similar manner.

This open source project allows developers to easily incorporate guided form fields without much setup. There are a number of parameter options which you can pass to adjust the width, animation style, and interface colors. Check out the online documentation to understand a bit more about how this works. I feel Progression.js is a simple way to get users engrossed with the process of filling out each field, and hopefully completing your form in its entirety.

Selectize.js

Anyone who has built web forms will recognize the ever-familiar select menu. This is a dropdown box which contains a number of options with different values, where some values are put together into option groups. Selectize.js is a free plugin which customizes your select menus to work with a more native user interface.

You have the choice of using a standard select menu with more customized design features – even where users can enter their own values into the select menu. Additionally Selectize.js allows you to turn select fields into tag-based input boxes. You’ll find these in many social networking sites like Tumblr where the already-existing tags appear in the list, and users are allowed to enter in new tags as well.

Selectize isn’t perfect for every form but it does provide a lot of circumstantial value. Tag-based inputs are tough to come around. This open source jQuery plugin offers all that functionality and even more for customizing the design of your select menus.

iCheck

This is one of my favorite plugins because of the many different templates you can choose from right out of the box. iCheck allows developers to style radio buttons and checkboxes within forms. There are different skins like Flat, Square, or Polaris which you can initiate along with the plugin. It is also possible to change the color scheme on each of these skins.

iCheck offers a tremendous amount of control to developers who want easily customized checkboxes & radios. There are different color-based stylesheets which you also need to include depending on which skin you are using. In regards to simplicity and ease-of-use, iCheck wins my approval every time.

Colpick

Color pickers are another fairly obscure user interface feature which are vitally important to certain web applications. There are a number of great solutions built with jQuery and I certainly couldn’t include all of them. Colpick is open source which you can download right from Github. The color picker UI is designed almost identical to Photoshop which is great for a majority of your technical users.

But even for people who have never used Adobe software before, this color picker plugin is fairly straightforward. I don’t think anyone would struggle for too long before figuring out how it works. The design is created entirely in JS/CSS and it is even supported in legacy browsers such as IE7/IE8. The latest edits are about a month old as of writing this article, so I’m sure we can expect future updates and bug fixes as time goes on.

jQuery Switchbutton

Apple iOS users must be familiar with the ON/OFF switch inputs you find on application settings pages. Many jQuery plugins(among other libraries) have been written to duplicate this effect on the web. For a natural jQuery effect Switchbutton is a really great choice. It offers plenty of custom options for changing the label text, trigger button, and how the input checkbox should pass values into the form.

You can also change up the design to look more like classic iOS, the newer iOS 5/6/7 rounded switch, or a minified version with no text. Check out the live plugin demo page to get an idea of how these switches work in a browser. This plugin is most beneficial when trying to improve user experience without re-designing large segments of the page.

Passy

Rating user password strength has been a popular choice for almost any website registration form. Sometimes you may feel that users are turned off by this functionality and find it annoying. But it can really help people determine if their password choice is complex enough to fend off brute-force hackers.

I really like Passy for jQuery because it has this dynamic strength rating system built-in alongside the functionality to generate random password strings. When initializing the plugin you can choose how many characters should be used for any new password, which characters are allowed(or disallowed) and where the new dynamic password should appear on the page. It’s an easygoing plugin without much hassle to help users rate their chosen password or generate a new one if they prefer more security.

Nod

This final example is a plugin built for validating input fields. Each form typically has a number of fields with minimum requirements such as the length of a username or e-mail address. Nod is a jQuery plugin for validating any type of input you can possibly think about. Check out the live demo example to get an idea of how this validation can work in the real world.

The large metrics table on the plugin’s website will outline some of the choices you have when validating input content. There is also another table filled with options which let you choose between how the errors are handled and when the plugin should check for validation. Nod is simply one of the most conclusive jQuery plugins for basic frontend validation and it works perfectly in any type of common web form. Also check out the official Github repo if you want to learn more about the plugin’s development.

FlowType.js: Better responsive typography

FlowType.js sets your font-size and line-height based on your element width, making your typography fully responsive. You’ll have the perfect number of characters per line regardless of screen size.

20 Resources for Beginner Designers & Developers

http://webdesignledger.com/resources/20-resources-for-beginner-designers-developers

Getting started in the world of design can be both thrilling and intimidating. Sometimes, you feel like you just don’t have the tools or skills you need to complete even the most basic projects. At other times, your mind is just buzzing with a multitude of ideas, but you may not have the best way to organize them. Yet, throughout the process of becoming a designer you will grow and expand both as a person, artist and designer.

Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions; there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated. – Paul Rand

The key to starting out a successful career in design, is creating your own toolkit. This toolkit should be an array of design resources that help you transform a blank canvas into something incredible. Today, we’ve compiled 20 of the best design resources out there for anyone starting out in the world of design. Here you’ll find design tools, as well as useful websites to help you complete design projects, gain inspiration, and become an awesome designer.

1. Lorem Ipsum Generators: For many of your design projects you’re going to want to know how text is going to look. You’ll normally see lorem ipsum text on website designs available for use and purchase so you can see how text would look on the site. Will the color scheme work well? Can you see the text? Is the text big enough? A lorem ipsum generator gives you a large amount of text to incorporate in your designs so you don’t have to come up with it yourself.

Here are some useful and funny lorem ipsum generators you can use for testing out the look and feel of your designs:

Hipster Ipsum

Cupcake Ipsum

One-Click Lorem Ipsum Generator

2. Icon Sets: As a designer, you’re going to need to be both versatile and quick when it comes to designing for clients. Sometimes you might not have the time to craft something entirely yourself, or may find that you’re missing a certain element. Having icon sets can help you create ads, banners, blog headers, campaign images, and web design in a snap. Use the icons to highlight important information, as part of background images, and for CTAs.

You should start out by playing around with icon sets from a single bundle and try coming up with all the ways you can use them. From there, try using icon sets of different styles and figuring out ways of incorporating them into different designs.

Cosmos Set (1471 Icons) by IcoJam

600 Stroke Vector Icons by Zlate

Flatties

The Ultimate Pack

UI Icons

Hand-Drawn Icons

3. Color Scheme and Color Palette Resources: When you’re just starting out with design you’re going to want to understand how colors work together, and which colors are right for certain projects.

Here are some sites to help you better understand how to use color in your designs:

• COLOURlovers: Browse palettes and create your own, discover new colors, and cool color combinations all in one site.
• HEX to RBG Converter: Know how to convert your colors for different purposes and color schemas.
• 0 to 255: This tool lets you select a color, or find a random color and then find variations of that color.
• Colorrrs: Discover random colors with the click of a button.

Interested in learning more about color? Check out these articles:

• Inspiring Examples of Color in Web Design: Greens and Blues
• Making Color Considerations for Mobile Design

Recommended books to help you better understand color and design:

• Color Design Workbook: A Real World Guide to Using Color in Graphic Design
• Design Elements, Color Fundamentals: A Graphic Style Manual for Understanding How Color Affects Design

4. Smashing Magazine: If you’re interested in coding, mobile design, web design, and UX/UI Smashing Magazine is a great place for beginners and veteran designers. You’ll find new articles every day related to design and development, along with books, workshops and a job board.

Here, are some articles you may enjoy from Smashing Magazine:

• Introducing Responsive Web Typography With FlowType.JS
• Designing For Emotion With Hover Effects
• 50 New Useful CSS Techniques, Tools and Tutorials

5. Bounce: This tool lets you look at different elements of any webpage and make comments, highlight a specific area, and share with others. It’s a great way to look at what other people are doing on the web and state what you like, what you don’t like, and what you would change. Bounce let’s you better understand other people’s websites so you can make your sites optimized for whatever you need.

6. Useful Design Checklists: It’s hard to put these items into one section, but I think one very important tool for beginning designers is having a checklist. A checklist can help you make sure that you’ve done everything you’ve needed for a project, that your design is user friends, that your design looks good, and more. Here are some of my favorites:

• Questions to ask clients before designing a website
• 22 Questions to Ask Before Developing a Website
• 42 Questions Every Freelancer Should Ask Their Clients
• How to Create an Effective Web Design Questionnaire
• Web Design Best Practices Checklist
• Quick Usability Checklist
• 25-point Website Usability Checklist
• A Website Design & Development Project Checklist / Template
• 15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website
• 50 Questions to Evaluate the Quality of Your Website

7. Moqups: Need help with wireframing? Moqups is an HTML 5 app that can be used for wireframing, mockups, and laying out user interface elements. Moqups also features collaboration tools that allow others to look at what you’ve created, offer advice and crticism and help your project become even better.

8. Take Courses: If you’re just starting out in the world of design and development, sometimes taking a course can help you fill in any gaps in your knowledge and help get you started to being able to create and design the things you’ve only ever dreamed of.

There are numerous places to take courses, and you can look at your nearest college or university, or you can check out these resources to learn online:

• CodeAcademy: Learn to code, interactively online.
• Treehouse: Take courses in web design and development, learn to build websites and smartphone apps, and even start your own freelance business with Treehouse.
• Teach Yourself Graphic Design: An online self-study course to help you learn the basics of graphic design.
• HOW Design University: Online courses and workshops for budding designers and freelancers.
• Udemy Design Courses: Select graphic design courses based on what you want to learn and be able to create.

9. Objects and Illustrations: Every designer, especially those just starting out needs resources to help create designs faster that look incredible. You can incorporate ready-made design resources like arrows, flourishes, banners, and borders to decrease the amount of work you have to do.

Here are some of our favorite resources:

225+ Vector Arrows

120 Decorative Shapes for PS and AI

Chalkboard Signs & Ribbons

Ornamental Flourishes

44 Decorative Vectors

67 Classic Frames

10. Pattern Tap: Ever just want to look at what other people are doing when it comes to different areas of their website. Pattern Tap showcases everything from buttons to UI to headers and footers. It’s a great way to browse what other people are doing around the web to get inspiration for your own designs.

11. Firebug: At some point during your process of growing and developing as a designer you’re going to want to check out what other people are doing when it comes to web design and development. Firebug is a free tool that integrates with Firefox, and lets you inspect and edit the HTML of websites. For example, you may wonder what’s making a website look a certain way. Firebug lets you inspect the code that creates the look and feel of a web page. It’s a handy tool every beginning designer should become familiar with.

12. Superhero.js: Both the creation and maintenance of expansive Javascript code can be difficult. Superhero.js has curated a number of resources to help you get on your way when it comes to Javascript. It’s a great resource for beginners and helpful to get you started.

13. Harvest: It’s extremely important to manage your time, keep track of hours, and be accurate with expense reporting when you’re just starting out. If you start out by using a software or program to monitor the work you’ve done, you’re more likely to stay organized and manage your work for clients well in the future. Harvest helps you manage your projects, track the time spent doing certain parts of your project, and helps you with invoicing clients.

14. Primer: This is a great tool for beginning designers looking to get into development. Primer allows you to copy and paste HTML into a doc, and then click the button and you get a basic CSS sheet based on the styles and classes you used in your HTML. It’s a great way to learn CSS and understand HTML vs CSS.

15. Tools for Responsive Design: You’re going to need to understand and be able to create responsive friendly designs if you’re going to world in the world of the internet. Having tools to help you create responsive design is important. Check out 12 Helpful Tools for Responsive Web Design and Top 10 Responsive Web Design Tools to get your designs responsive-ready.

16. Google Fonts: If you’re looking to use fonts on your website, or just understand how fonts work on the internet, Google Fonts is a great tool to see trending fonts, understand how fonts look on the web check out what text looks like with different typefaces.

17. Background, Texture, and Pattern Sets: When it comes to design you’re going to need a wide variety of backgrounds and textures to incorporate into your designs. It’s good to have hundreds of items that you can use and change for different design projects. You can combine backgrounds and textures to create new looks, and incorporate patterns into different areas of print and web design. Here are some of our favorite sets for your design use:

Textured Watercolor Backgrounds

Soft Colored Textures

200 Blurred & Noisy Backgrounds

Chalkboard Textures

18. Gridwax: This easy to use bookmarklet allows you to add a grid overlay to your website to help you make sure everything is aligned and looks just how you want it to.

19. Launchlist: It’s important to make sure you have everything finished, complete, and ready to go when you’re about to publish a new design or submit something to a client. Launchlist is a tool that helps people in the area of web design and development to check their work before publishing. When you’re just starting out, it’s important to make sure you have all your bases covered and that you know your designs are complete. This tool will help you make sure you complete your projects with ease, and that you didn’t forget anything.

20. Font Resources for Designers: Every designer, no matter what skill level, should have a number of fonts in their design toolkit. When you’re just starting out, you’ll want to spend a lot of time playing with fonts, seeing fonts look combined together, and what fonts look best for print and web.

You’re going to want your toolkit to contain fonts of different styles including: display fonts, script fonts, serif fonts, san-serif fonts, and unique fonts to play with and get used to using together in your designs.

Here are some fonts to get your toolkit started:

Stay Gold Script & Web Font by Decade Type Foundry

Lunchbox by Kimmy Design

Nueva York by Ed J Brown

Mocha Mattari

Church in the Wildwood

Black Velvet

Dirty Flamingo

페르소나(persona, 복수형 personas)는 어떤 제품 혹은 서비스를 사용할 만한 목표 인구 집단 안에 있는 다양한 사용자 유형들을 대표하는 가상의 인물이다. 페르소나는 어떤 제품이나 혹은 서비스를 개발하기 위하여 시장과 환경 그리고 사용자들을 이해하기 위해 사용되는데 어떤 특정한 상황과 환경속에서 어떤 전형적인 인물이 어떻게 행동할 것인가에 대한 예측을 위해 실제 사용자 자료를 바탕으로 개인의 개성을 부여하여 만들어진다. 페르소나는 가상의 인물을 묘사하고 그 인물의 배경과 환경 등을 설명하는 문서로 꾸며지는데 가상의 이름, 목표, 평소에 느끼는 불편함, 그 인물이 가지는 필요 니즈등으로 구성된다. 소프트웨어 개발, 가전제품 개발, 인터렉션 디자인 개발 등의 분야에서 사용자 연구의 한 방법과 마케팅 전략 수립을 위한 자료로 많이 이용되고 있다.

역사[편집]

1988년 앨런 쿠퍼의 저서 "《정신병원에서 뛰쳐나온 디자인》"(Inmates Are Running the Asylum)에서 페르소나의 개념이 처음 소개되었다. 페르소나는 연구의 목적으로 개발된 방법론이 아니라 실무 중심의 방법론이다. 그 독특한 효과 덕분에 90년대부터 소프트웨어 개발과 인터렉션 디자인 분야에서 점점 인기를 끌게 되었다.^[1]

앨런 쿠퍼는 1983년경에 시작한 프로젝트 개발 지원 프로그램 개발 프로젝트에서 당시 프로젝트 관리 업무를 맡고 있던 캐시라는 여성과 프로젝트 개발을 위해 일하게 되었다. 이때 그는 캐시의 역할과 행동을 흉내내어 기능성과 인터렉션 디자인 개발 과정에서 의사결정을 하는 데 이용하게 되었다. 이는 좋은 반응을 낳았고 이후 "루비"라는 비주얼 프로그래밍 언어를 개발할 때에도 "루비"라는 실제 IT업무를 담당하는 관리자를 모델로 한 가상인물을 만들어 이용하였다. 1995년에 세이전트의 고객들을 위한 인터렉션 디자인을 하면서 "척","신시아" 그리고 "랍"이라는 특정 목적을 위한 페르소나를 만들어 다양한 사용자들을 패턴화하고 이를 설명하는 데 사용하였다.^[1]

페르소나 방법의 이점[편집]

페르소나의 방법론의 선구자인 프루이트와 아드린에 따르면 페르소나의 사용은 제품 개발에 있어서 몇가지 중요한 잇점을 가지는 연구 방법이다. 이 방법을 사용하면 복잡한 데이터나 통계자료에 의존하여 시장과 사용자를 이해하는 대신 인간의 얼굴을 가진 한 개인적 인격체로서 보다 인지적으로 가깝게 느낄 수 있게 된다. 어떤 가상적 인물이 가질 필요에 대해 생각하게 되면 디자이너는 실제 사용자들이 필요하고 느낄만한 것에 대해 보다 쉽게 이해하고 접근할 수 있게 된다. 페르소나는 브레인 스토밍이나 유스케이스 분석 혹은 기능 정의등의 개발과정에 다양하게 쓰일 수 있다. 또한 페르소나는 마케팅, 디자인, 판매등 다양한 조직간에 사용자 이해를 위한 상호소통의 도구로서 유용하게 이용할 수 있다.

1. 개발 팀 내부에서 어떤 특정하고 지속적으로 다양한 대상 사용자 그룹들의 이해를 돕는 데 쓰인다. 다양한 조사 데이터는 적절한 맥락안에서 조합되며 탄탄히 연결된 이야기 구조에서 이해되고 기억되어 개발 과정에 이용된다.
2. 어떤 특정한 사용자 페르소나에게 해결안이 얼마나 적합할지를 평가하고 또한 그렇게 만족 시키도록 유도하는 가이드의 역할을 한다. 기능들은 하나 혹은 여러 페르소나가 가지는 필요를 얼마나 만족사키는지에 따라 우선순위가 매겨질 수 있다.
3. 목표 대상의 인구학적 연구에서 만들어진 데이터에 사람의 개성을 부여함으로써 보다 인간적인 접근을 하고 동감을 느끼는 것이 가능하도록 하여 목표 대상에 보다 집중하는 데 도움이 된다.

Native Form Elements: A handy visual reference

StackEdit: An online editor with Markdown Extra support

구글지도 마커 쉽게 만들기

http://codepen.io/katydecorah/pen/Klieu

위 사이트로 들어가서 주소 검색 후 셋팅을 다 하고,

아래 빨간 동그라미의 내용을 가져다가 붙이면 주소가 짠!