How to design an online form Part 1 of 4: It’s high time to review your form and make it better
Forms (online, offline, doesn’t matter) seem to be a quite underrated form of data collection and communication. Good form can help, bad one can cost you time, money and potential clients.
We don’t like forms, sometimes we hate them, especially when we are asked questions which are totally irrelevant or force us to choose from options which do not reflect who we are or what we want to do.
We’ll do it later…
Many organizations from private and public sector are improving their websites, implementing new features, adding new flashy functionality in their apps, but forget to stop for a while and reflect over their forms.
Forms are something which they have quite often in the end of the to-do list. Sometimes they add some animation to make filling them out more “fun”, but that’s it. They tend not to review it, not to think if questions they are asking and answers they provide are still relevant.
Just ask “WHY?”
If you take even an hour of your time and look at the form and ask yourself few questions, you will see that improving the form may be way easier than you think, information you capture more valuable to your business and time better spent.
Usually if you work in certain place for a while you know what the main pain points are you just have to find a way and time to address them.
If you want to have a list of basic improvements ready within an hour, ask yourself those questions:
- Do users understand our questions?
Do you use plain English? Is your terminology understood by people who are not in your business? Sometimes if you try to use too fancy or to technical language trying to show off you may shoot yourself in a foot because person not understanding the question won’t give you a true answer.
2. Why we’re asking for that information?
Forms are prone to inherit stuff from old times and usually people are adding new questions hardly never getting rid of old ones. Sometimes companies are collecting certain data just to be able to cope with a legacy system. Try to go through the form and looking at every field or question ask WHY you need it.
3. Aren’t we limiting our users by having single choice drop-downs?
Depending on the form you may face the complex array of needs, circumstances and dependencies. Life is not a 0–1 system (Even 0–1 system is a horrendous number of 0–1 combinations). Sometimes the option may be not clear and prone to misinterpretation. Does yes/no answer satisfies you? Many times I met with the situation when people were saying “yes, but…“ and this “yes” was in the end no…
4. Do we provide the whole array of options to choose from?
People tend to look at the world through the prism of their experiences and not always this experience is covering all the possible options. Sometimes limited choice is the advantage but in other cases it can hide the true problem or a real opportunity we weren’t aware of. Sometimes an easy follow up question for ‘Other’ may show you the issue you had no idea about.
5. Should we let them write the answer instead of choosing formatted option?
Sometimes we can offer only certain services or reply to specific inquiries, but in some cases it is worth to let people write what they need or want as we can discover things which we did not expect.
Questions are actually the main tool of psycho therapists. They mostly ask questions but they do it in a way, that answering you feel like you’re discovering something about yourself you haven’t seen/realized before.
Forms are the form of communication. One-sided communication but are very important tool collecting valuable data and also representing the company or organization so if you
- care about people filling in your form
- respect those people
- care about your team, people who work with collected data
- care about your company reputation
- say, you do everything in the best way you can
you should care about forms.
Forms are one of the easiest way of receiving various types of data not only quantitative but also qualitative. This is why you — form owners - should be also kind to users. Should make things as easy as possible for those who fill them out and those who process them.
Will that ever change?
I won’t say that forms will change significantly soon, but companies should improve their forms quality pretty soon. GDPR forces us all to reflect over questions we ask and how and what for we use collected data. This is a good enough reason to take the dust off our forms and ask ourselves or the business who use it WHY — many times, in different contexts.
This is first article from form-related series ‘How to design an online form’. Click the link to read Part 2 , Part 3 and Part 4
I’m happy to read what you think about this topic, feel free to share your thoughts or experiences.
Thanks for reading!
P.S. Sorry for grammar errors, I’m still trying to improve my writing.
