Luke Wroblewski
lukew.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2007
Luke Wroblewski writes on web and mobile interface design, especially form design, with talks, articles and books.
What HN saysHN commenters recommend his advice on form design and web usability, and cite his tests, such as button alignment, in design discussions.
176HN people shared it
49linked it in comments
153stories submitted
2.0Kstory points
4 months agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1How Twitter increased conversion rate to 29% by adding 1 extra step.8 people · 76 points · first shared 2010 · 10 comments on HN
- 2Ff6 people · first shared 2007
- 3Touch Gesture Reference Guide4 people · 3 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 4Primary and Secondary Actions in Web Forms (2007)4 people · 2 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 5Homepage4 people · first shared 2010
- 6"Mad Libs" Style Form Increases Conversion 25-40%3 people · 272 points · first shared 2010 · 50 comments on HN
- 7Responsive Design Patterns3 people · 197 points · first shared 2012 · 9 comments on HN
- 8The more features you add3 people · 63 points · first shared 2023 · 34 comments on HN
- 9Obvious Always Wins3 people · 5 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 10RESS: Responsive Design + Server Side Components3 people · 4 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 11Entry3 people · first shared 2011
- 12Functioning Form - The Apple Store's Checkout Form Redesign2 people · 28 points · first shared 2009 · 6 comments on HN
- 13On Twitter Acquiring Bagcheck...2 people · 20 points · first shared 2011 · 1 comments on HN
- 14Designing for iOS7: Perils & Pluses2 people · 8 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 15Best Practices for Form Design (pdf)2 people · 7 points · first shared 2007 · 1 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
maerek · 2012-07-31
I've been fortunate enough to attend talks given by both Luke Wroblewski (LUKEW, http://www.lukew.com/) and Joshua Clarke (Global Moxie, http://globalmoxie.com). Both have written excellent books on design principles and UX/UI implementation (Luke on web form design, Joshua on app interfaces and design).
If you're interested in web standards and design, http://www.alistapart.com/ is also a great site to follow.
spullara · 2025-10-06
We have been building MCP servers and this looks very good directionally. Fills a bunch of holes in the protocol and gives meaning to something that were kind of like placeholders. Being able to return UI to the client is fantastic and will make lots of things possible. We have been working on these kinds of things assuming that the clients would improve to meet us.
https://lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?2122
uxcolumbo · 2021-03-09
Here are some results from a test Luke Wroblewski did many years ago.
The best performing option was where the buttons were left aligned.
See: https://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?571
But agreed, if you can test your designs with users then you should.
GFischer · 2010-10-07
I like Luke Wroblewski's advice a lot (http://www.lukew.com/ plus his two books on form design and web usability)
I have to worry about form design mostly, so two links I liked were
http://www.uie.com/articles/web_forms/ and
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2006/07/label-placement-in-forms.…
I also stole some ideas from here:
http://developer.fellowshipone.com/patterns/
Those are the ones I've read and somewhat followed.
I also bookmarked this framework to try out:
http://gantry-framework.org/
There are also several eyetracking services (some provided by Ycombinator companies I believe) - I'd love to have eyetracking studies on the company website, but the current management doesn't mind that it looks like crap since it will be outsourced anyways.
teej · 2009-08-05
LukeW did a talk in March that goes in to more depth then that article. It's definitely worth listening to: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?794
gotorazor · 2022-08-15
Looks like the presentation is over ten years old.
Here is the author’s URL for this presentation.
https://www.lukew.com/presos/preso.asp?19#events
He has place and dates for all the instances where he presented it. Maybe there will be something on YouTube.
But these are back to 2007, digital video cameras and production standards for tech conferences won’t be to the same level as those today.
mikehall314 · 2020-12-04
Luke Wroblewski has long been a critic of the hamburger icon, citing both that hiding key components of your application behind a burger menu is bad for engagement [1] and that the meaning of that icon as "menu" is not as well understood as we may think [2]. These claims are a few years old now, so things may have moved on -- I would be interested to see up-to-date analysis of how users interact with and understand these icons.
[1] https://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1945
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-FMTPsgy_Y&t=43m45s
ominous · 2016-12-07
Well, http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html and a more recent formulation: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1696
sogen · 2015-11-27
Looks like a rehash of Luke W's previous articles
http://www.lukew.com/ff/
He even took Luke W's pics of Luke W's Polar app...
johnatwork · 2015-08-10
Another good observation on this by Luke Wroblewski.
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1945
softawre · 2015-07-20
Yikes. What's funny is the article writer is a product director at Google.
Fix this Luke!
http://www.lukew.com/about/
lftl · 2015-07-20
This article made me think about my usage of dropdowns on mobile, and presented a few alternatives that I'll probably reach for more often now.
As far as people being so called experts I'm not sure you're going to find someone with much more experience than Luke:
http://www.lukew.com/about/
didgeoridoo · 2014-04-14
For more on the subject of "optimistic interactions", check out Luke Wroblewski's post from July of last year on getting the Polar app to feel super-responsive: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1759
charlieirish · 2014-01-21
I think there are many opportunities for 'consultancy' in this area. Design is not just about working in photoshop at your desk until 'it's done'.
A few examples:
1. Nathan Barry's latest photoshop course is akin to 'consultancy' in that he is providing an educational service to others. He is charging for access to this course which means it can continue bringing in revenue whilst he works on other projects.
2. Luke Wroblewski and Gabriel Svennerberg are both accomplished UX Designers who consult for companies. Much of their time is spent advising clients by asking questions rather than simply designing the answer.
3. Clarity.fm and AnyFu provide a consultancy marketplace for designers (amongst other professions)
[1] http://nathanbarry.com/photoshop/
[2] http://www.lukew.com/ http://www.svennerberg.com/
[3] https://clarity.fm/browse/search/design http://anyfu.com/
mncolinlee · 2013-08-21
Rather than just saying you're wrong, I will let Luke Wroblewski explain why changing a working website to put mobile first is rarely ever wrong no matter how successful your site has been in the past.
Video/Audio/PDF Presentation:
http://www.lukew.com/presos/preso.asp?26
If you want a mobile first version of Hacker News for now, a fan created a nice HTML5 app version of the site.
http://hn.premii.com/
dncrane · 2013-07-24
> any suggestions on how to fix this?
Could you have separate input boxes for each segment of the phone number? (as in #2 here: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1015 )
neogodless · 2013-05-20
And the article by headline was listed on this page:
http://www.lukew.com/ff/
But it also linked incorrectly to "Mobile Devices Per Day." Now it seems to have vanished completely.
Zimahl · 2013-05-20
I think I found the proper link:
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1697
masklinn · 2013-02-28
> Isn't Foundation already responsive?
Yes.
> Don't most websites built with Foundation's grid system automatically fit nicely on mobile devices?
Yes, but responsive designs always means tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs will be different depending whether you're "desktop first" and scaling down or "mobile first" and scaling up. And of course, the framework can set a course on what to check and where to start from.
Luke Wroblewski is a big advocate of tackling responsive design from the bottom ("Mobile First"): http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?933 http://www.abookapart.com/products/mobile-first and he apparently pushed for Foundation 4 to much better support this design style.
lifeisstillgood · 2012-09-19
Yes, and it will radically change as the web stops being English / Latin alphabet dominated.
Typography for Japanese characters is fascinating - three different languages almost, sitting in the same sentence, the cadence of language reflecting in the angles or spacing,
the possibilities are an order of magnitude more complex than English - and an order of magnitude more rewarding.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/esthet/3454734/ - beauty in calligraphy
http://www.kfstudio.net/himaji/ - cute fontface for Kanji
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?111 - a good primer
LanceJones · 2012-06-28
Actually, I believe the term "Mobile First" was coined by Luke Wroblewski, and Luke's post below pre-dates Fred's by nearly a year:
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?933
One of Luke's key tenets on Mobile First is about how smaller screen sizes force you to focus your messages -- and lack of focus is a huge issue for most Web sites.
Fred seems to be coming at it from a slightly different angle, but I think it's important to include Luke's ideas here in the discussion... it's how designers and UI experts think about the term "Mobile First".
lnanek2 · 2012-06-17
Here's an actual eye tracking study that comes to the opposite result of the linked article:
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?571
This isn't really surprising. The article claimed he just knew from experience and didn't need to do a test, so the whole article was just bullshit.
I was laughing out loud when he said users read all the options before picking one anyway, since I've seen that not happen in countless tests. Users don't generally give a crap about your interface, won't read instructions or screens fully, and will just scan and grab on to something that matches their current goal.
nerdfiles · 2012-05-05
The computer is being used in so many ways to extend our abilities, I can see no other possibility than to regard it as part of our extended phenotype.
— Steven Pemberton
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1386
creativityhurts · 2012-05-03
In my opinion, this is one of the most important features of CSS preprocessors. Wether you're doing rapid prototyping and working on the real deal, having a set of variables for colors, fonts and whatnot helps you a lot controlling the look and feel of your site and avoid mistakes that even Facebook did [1]
This is one of the main reasons why foundations like Twitter Bootstrap or Compass are awesome but unfortunately people are so lazy they don't even change the color variables in Bootrstrap, hence the "yet another Twitter Bootstrap" site.
[1] Facebook had 706 CSS files, they declared the Facebook blue color 261 times, used 548 unique hex values for colors, had 6498 declarations of color. http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1379
dmolsen · 2012-02-25
I probably should have done a better job of explaining RESS. Luke Wroblewski coined it as part of his initial article on Responsive Design + Server Side Components. I just assume the 'D' gets dropped somewhere along the way in creating the acronym ;) When I wrote the article I assumed most of my regular readers would be familiar with it. Luke's original RESS article: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1392
ahmadss · 2012-01-27
Two come to mind:
1 - An Event Apart
(http://aneventapart.com/)
2 - Future of Web Design (http://futureofwebdesign.com/london-2012/)
Or
Anything that LukeW presents ... http://www.lukew.com/presos/
rohitarondekar · 2011-11-22
Articles by Luke Wroblewski are pretty good in this regard: http://www.lukew.com/ff/
Hrundi · 2011-11-19
Check this out:
http://www.lukew.com/resources/articles/psactions.asp
Google does this a lot. Facebook too. Hope it helps!
ashbrahma · 2011-08-08
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1371 Looks like Luke is not going to Twitter.
Johngibb · 2011-05-08
PS: Here's the original blog that was the source of the apple image: http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?968