Sometimes the simplest technology can have the biggest impact. Of all the changes I've ever made at any of my sites, the one that people liked the best was also one of the simplest to implement: live preview.

Live preview echoes what a user writes as she types. It allows the user to see how the writing looks in the context in which it will be published, rather than within little windows in small forms. It does so before she submits the new or modified material. It's also quite easy to implement a nonscript and/or accessible alternative: you provide a preview page where a user can review the writing before it's permanently submitted. You can even provide both: live preview and a Preview button.

Where is live preview most useful? Anytime you ask for commentary from the web page reader. This includes email messages to be sent to customer service, comments on weblogs, feedback in product reviews--anyplace a user is writing more than a few words.

Live preview consists of listening for any activity in a form field, capturing the keys pressed, and echoing them to another page element. How you echo depends on how active you want the preview to be.

You can echo the letters as they're typed for a true "live" experience. You can also provide a Preview button, but rather than opening up a new page, it will display the comment directly in the page. This approach doesn't capture the keypress, and the data from the comment field is accessed only when the Preview button is activated.

Both approaches have good points and bad, which I'll get into as we look at each individual approach.