Forms are often where you’re directly interacting with your audience. They are engaging with you by choosing to provide information about themselves. Whether it’s to sign up for your newsletter or buy your product, your users are trusting you with their information.
When site visitors get to your form, what do they see? Is it a thoughtful page clearly outlining what to expect upon filling out the form, or is it a generic yet invasive set of fields that’s confusing to complete?
Great form design will ultimately lead to more conversions. To improve the forms on your website, follow the tips below.
Avoid asking for TMI
Don’t add more fields than you need. While you may want to take the opportunity to learn more about your audience by adding another question, that one question could seriously increase your abandonment rate. You’re asking users to trust you, and in today’s world of privacy concerns they’re wary of giving out too much information.
Keep it in one column
Having more than one column on your form is too confusing a user experience. Is the user supposed to go all the way to the bottom and then back up, or switch back between columns? Make it visually obvious what you want the user to do.
Start with the easy stuff
Asking your users to start with their name and email – something to which they readily know the answer – makes it easier for them to start filling out your form. Once they’ve entered that information, and move onto more open-ended or thought-provoking questions, they may be less likely to abandon the form because they’ve already started.
Save time with inline form field validation
It’s frustrating when a user fills out a lengthy form, only to receive an error message and risk losing all the answers. Let users know immediately that their email is invalid, or that they’ve moved onto the next question without completing the previous one. This will save them time and make them less likely to leave your form out of frustration.
Keep text conversational
If your site includes forms that collect survey information, the questions and multiple-choice answers should flow easily. For example, standard survey language like, “Do you have any widgets? If yes, how much widgets do you have?” is not conversational. Instead ask, “How many widgets do you have?” and allow for a “Zero” option.
If you are asking personal questions, explain why
Sometimes you need to ask personal questions beyond name and email. Address and credit card seem self-explanatory for a purchase, but customers may wonder why you need their phone number. Adding some text explaining how this aids delivery and that their phone number will not be sold will put customers at ease. Legally, you should also have a page on your site that explains how you collect and use user data; make sure a link to this page is featured prominently on all site pages.
Use reCAPTCHA to avoid spam
If you’ve ever tried to figure out what on Earth the CAPTCHA on an online form says, only to be denied several times, you know it’s a major deterrent for submitting information online. Instead of using the old CAPTCHA technology that requires your users decipher a blurry word, use reCAPTCHA. A reCAPTCHA is more effective at preventing spam than a bot, and requires users to simply check a box affirming they are human.
Ready to revamp the forms on your website? Talk to IDMI.Net today to learn how we can help.