A Form Was Never Just a Sheet of Paper

Escaping a black hole in form design

In a 2014 usability study at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), a graduate student used a damning metaphor to describe her experience submitting a digital form:

“Applying online is like throwing a paper airplane into a black hole.” — UCLA Graduate Student

Forms have not been our favorite part of the web. Like the paper forms that inspired them, they can be difficult to read and seemingly impossible to fill out. This is where the new form building technologies target most of their attention. But in her metaphor, our student didn’t focus on the filling-out part. True, she spent time folding a paper plane just so, but then poof! It disappeared. Into what? A placeless place from which nothing escapes.

Students rarely experience a form as an efficient step toward a goal. After leaving her hands, a one-page form can take weeks to wind its way through a bureaucratic institution — all the while a student has little understanding of its progress or how “processing it” could take so long.

Since the bar is so low with forms, we didn’t have to do much to improve a user’s experience. We could simply apply Wroblewski’s best practices as we transposed the…