Form design sounds so boring, but my hunch is that it’s a lot more important than most website owners think. More care and consideration should be given to both their layout and their contents.
I’m rereading a book I just think is great. It’s “Designing the Moment” by Robert Hoekmann. As I’m reading a section about form design, I think about how often I’ve worked with forms where nobody on the development team gave the form’s layout any thought, including me. Before you blow this off as nit-picky, think about how important forms are for a website. We’re talking about the device that signs people up, checks them out, tells you about their concerns so you can do business with them, helps you to have information about who they are, their preferences and more, right? Shouldn’t the web world take it a bit more seriously then? If your visitor bounces off that page, they’re leaving your site right at the goal. Consider this… if you (as a site owner) take the forms on your site seriously, it may turn into real business for you!
Have you ever wondered why simple contact forms are different on almost every site? Are the labels aligned left or aligned right? Are the fields varied in size or similar? Does it tell you how many characters you can enter into each field or do you often have to guess and edit back? If it’s a long form, are you giving your visitors the opportunity to know how much they have left to finish? Have you helped them, not only to know when something is wrong, but to know when what they’ve entered is right and will validate?
Hoekmann makes an excellent point about designing forms around what people are most likely to do, rather than giving the user every possibility available. Streamline it. Keep it short and simple if at all possible. Make it easy. Help the user know how to complete it faster.
Sometimes I’ve presented this argument about what people are likely to do and people ask, is that really what people are most likely to do? Well I don’t know for sure that everyone would, but do we really need to supply statistics to test that out or can we just go with our gut? My gut says people usually Save or Submit or click OK, not Cancel. I’m going to go with that. At a certain point, I will trust what I’ve learned from watching people use the web.
I absolutely will optimize a form’s design and content, but not if I’m 95% certain of the behavior that would happen, 95% of the time.
The next time I confront a simple contact form or any other form, I’m going to give it more thought, and craft a design that helps it to be completed, quickly, easily, and accurately. And I will think it was worth the effort.
