How to design an online form — Part 3 — What… not to ask for
I wanted to focus here on the best practices for creating ‘questions’ for your online form. But because people used to create forms in a careless way I want to tell you about what not to ask for.
If the form is like a conversation, what I mentioned in my previous text about the language, you, as the designer need to remember that you’re the one leading it and it is your responsibility to design it well and create an easy and self-explanatory form.
Question everything
Looking at any kind of a form, have you ever thought how they use the information you provide? Do they really need it to be able to provide you with what you want?
I bet you did it many times, I do it constantly, but it makes me feel very uncomfortable.
Usually, we’re designing forms commissioned by various stakeholders. Quite often at first we even aren’t briefed properly, they just give us an old form and ask to change it into an online version.
Questioning things and understanding the activity for which the information is collected are the most important phases of the form design process. It’s our basic research, a time when we’re looking for borders of our creativity. Yes, to design a good form you need to be creative, you need to explore the process, narrow down the amount of information needed to a minimum and… convince others that it’s the best way to go.
It’s challenging to design an easy to fill and self explanatory form. Can you recall when last time you filled in the form which was easy and you knew what to do and the feeling of frustration never went through your mind?
If you did, please share! I’m starving for examples of well-designed forms!
The standard information you may want to ask for
There is always a set of information people used to ask for. First and last names are usually the standard mandatory fields. What causes a frustration of many people especially those with names which system does not ‘approve’ refusing validation, examples you can find in a great article written by John Moore Williams.
But the thing is, that quite often this information is not needed. Honestly, when you are creating an account the name is enough, you don’t need to disclose your full details, there’s no real need for the company, for example like twitter to know it.
There’s no longer a universal list of basic details to collect. Forms should be tailored to the purpose of the service you want to provide or product you want to offer. Simple to say but more difficult to execute, especially when you have stakeholders, not on your side…
Let’s start with classics
If you think that asking for the gender is still a standard you are wrong. Can you tell me honestly in how many cases a product or the service depends on gender of the user? I’m not telling about targeted marketing because it’s not something people are signing up for.
I just want to remind you that we have a nice thing called GDPR, you probably heard about it a lot recently, read what it says about asking for gender or sex
You should only ask users about gender or sex if you genuinely can’t deliver your service without this information.
— gov.uk
Ok, imagine you came up with the reason
You still can be a user advocate. You can provide a fair choice which won’t exclude certain people or won’t make them uncomfortable.
But how many options should you provide? I think you know that no it’s no longer limited to male/female. Adding ‘other’ becomes a standard but is not exactly friendly, seems to be quite stigmatizing in my opinion.
If you have to ask about gender, you should:
- list the fields in alphabetical order
- do research to test that this works for your users
Great article on ‘Designing forms for gender diversity and inclusion’ was written by Sabrina Fonseca a while ago. If you are interested in this topic it’s definitely worth to read.
Special cases
‘But I can’t create a new user profile without choosing a gender’ I heard once from a service provider who was processing forms.
If you ask for an information which is not relevant to your service but because you are required to fill in because of a technical constraint of your software this is your problem and you should solve it, not the user. Technical constraints can’t be the reason justifying the fact that you demand certain information from the user.
You are the one who needs to cope with your legacy system. By the way, it will be a great opportunity to make a general review of your organisation’s software and may improve your online security, don’t you think so?
GDPR let you ask only for that information which is crucial for you to be able to provide a service or a product as I mentioned before. So if you offer a subscription to a magazine and you ask for gender… nope, you can’t anymore.
As a conscious user I would know that by asking for those you’re trying to collect as much data as possible to be able to perform best-profiled advertising (or sell my details to those who want to do so), but I’m buying a product from you and don’t want to continue this relationship afterwards.
The title
No, this is not a placeholder text I left for myself to come up with a catchy title, but it sounds as irrelevant as a question I see in many forms. Asking for someone’s title is one of the most common and annoying parts of the form for me. Asking for the title was a classic move from the past. It was a way to state a female formal situation and at some point kind of a courtesy, but it became a habit and now it is just offensive in my opinion and shouldn’t take place in most cases.
You may say I’m radical. Well, I am but Governmental digital services guidelines are supporting my opinion.
Avoid asking users for their title.
It’s extra work for them and you’re asking them to potentially reveal their gender and marital status, which they may not want to do.
— gov.uk
During last years I came across less and more build up lists of titles. From classic Mr, Ms, Mrs, Mss to… well I’ll better show you a screenshot because it’s long
I’ve signed up to afew charities already but I’ve never seen such a long list!
I was astonished, I even asked them that I can help them with reviewing the form to make it better. I was invited to take part in the user testing of their new website and form.
It’s been 6 months ago and this form is still there, some people don’t like changes.
There is no need to ask for the title. If you think you do, you need to be aware of the consequences it may cause.
I know that sometimes people really need to ask for the title, but usually, it does not take place when you are shopping online or signing up for a gym…
While ago (2011) even people in public organisations started a discussion about taking it out.
If you really need to ask for a title
Ok, but you may have a manager who persists they need that question despite all the reasons you listed them. You can still do something.
Well, this is a reality, not always you can do what you think is the best for people as you have a stakeholder…
What you can actually do is to support people who are not keen on revealing their title because of many reasons *you are not the person to ask for those. You can be a silent allay and leave a free text field or add an option Mx which is becoming more and more popular. It’s not a new thing, it was firstly used in 1970. It’s commonly known as a gender-neutral title and you can come across it more often now.
What to ask for
The answer is kind of easy: only for the information you really need… But the way of establishing what it is, may take time. But with this time you will learn, grow your experience and work out the best method to find out the essence you need to get.
The future note
Quite often people creating forms don’t know how to do it and are copying old versions which are far from being user-friendly. This is why now whenever I hear that someone in my organisation or even any of my friends are working on a form I offer my help and I encourage you to do the same. I believe that designing user-friendly forms we can contribute to the society.
Thanks for reading. If you’ve found it interesting, you may have a look at my older articles from the series:
How to design an online form:
Part 1: It’s high time to review your form and make it better
Part 2: The language
In the next article I will focus on the structure of the form.
*If you have any comments or suggestions feel free to share it.
*If you were suffering while reading this piece and have found many errors, let me know. English is not my first language but I’m trying my best.
