Forms are more important than homepages

Matt Weston, 4 Nov

Tom Peters (from Re-imagine!):
“A form is never just a form. Consider the role that form design played in the US presidential-election “system” in 2000. A poorly designed paper ballot in Palm Beach County, Florida, may have cost Al Gore the White House. Think about it.”

Form design is unglamorous but critical work. Every man and his dog has a subjective opinion about the yellow and orange you use on your homepage, or if Yahoo!’s homepage is better than Google’s. But who really knows (or cares) about form design? Who knows that marking required fields with asterisks loses significantly more sales than marking fields that are not required? Or that ugly error handling can cost you more sales than an ugly homepage? (Suggested reading: the distinctly unglamorous Call to Action.)

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Reader comments
3 comments so far, add yours below

Iain Row says:
“Who knows that marking required fields with asterisks loses significantly more sales than marking fields that are not required?”

*gulp*

Really? I’ve not done any reasearch on this, or read ‘Call to Action’, but speaking personally, I think the ‘Asterisk = required’ model is so common that breaking it would be counterproductive.

I notice that this comments form uses the model, as do all of my sites, and indeed every site I can remember using recently…
by Iain Row on 4 Nov

Lee says:
Instead of using asterisks, why not write a simple: PLEASE FILL IN ALL THE FIELDS message at the top of the form? If any field is then left blank a message can pop up to ask for completion. No asterisks required, and no confusion. Using the words “required” and/or “mandatory” sound very techie/official and if anything this is probably what puts people off - being told how to fill in a form is a little patronising - ideally, it should be self-evident.
by Lee on 13 Jan

Iain Row says:
I take your point; if you look at the signup form for My World Journal - http://www.myworldjournal.com/new.asp - you’ll see that there are no asterisks, because if I don’t need the information, I don’t waste time asking for it.

My World Journal is a site that I developed for myself, not an external client. I took the decision that I could get away with the bare minimum of contact information, particularly as the site users would be travellers, and therefore address and phone number information would be likely to become out-of-date regularly. For my clients, who are generally SMEs, the decision is not so straightforward.

The problem is that sometimes there is information they would ideally like to record, but don’t want to make compulsary. Things like a visitor’s fax number might be very useful if they have one, but of course you can’t make it a required field, or only people who actually own fax machines (or can be bothered to fabricate a number) could submit the form.

This is what stops you putting ‘Please fill in all the fields’.
by Iain Row on 16 Jan