Made to Fill: Why some forms work and others don’t

Forms are everywhere. Most of us will fill in at least one form every day: logging in at work, filling in timesheets, signing for credit card purchases, etc. Major events in our lives have forms associated with them, from the birth register filled in by the nurse or midwife when we are born to marriage certificates, passport applications, and voter registrations.

Most companies spend millions of dollars to market their product and services. Companies focus a lot of effort to make sure the buying experience on their websites is excellent. The buying experience will increase the chances of buying and can develop loyal customers to the website.

60% of the buying experience relies on the form that needs to be filled to complete the purchase order. Simple forms are considered more user friendly and improve the buying experience, while forms that are very complicated or not clear will cause frustration and make potential buyers leave your website without purchasing your product and services.

If you understand people, you can design better forms. There are typically three types of people visiting your website; first, rushers, refuses, and readers. Readers carefully read the form before making a purchase. Rushers begin completing fields and only read when they think it is necessary.

Refusers these users won’t have anything to do with the form. When making a form, you need to make one that all three of these users are capable of using. According to Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney’s Forms that Work, there are three layers of the form to capture full information from your customer. These are relationship, conversation, and appearance. The relationship of a form is the relationship between the organization that is asking the questions and the person who is answering.

The conversation of a form comes from the questions that it asks, any other instructions, and the way the form is arranged into topics. The appearance of a form is the way that it looks: the arrangement of text, input areas such as fields and graphics, and the use of color. By applying the right technique you can convert your prospect to the client.

Resource used: Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability