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How friendly are your forms?

Posted: March 8, 2007

Patricia has a nice write up at Search Engine Land on reducing the barriers to registration. She mostly focuses on forms, so I’d like to offer a little bit of follow up advice.

How intimidating do your forms look?

If you think of collecting:

Name
Address
Phone number
Email

How many form fields does that require?

You could collect:

First name
Middle initial
Last name
Address line 1
Address line 2
Apartment/suite number
City
State
Zip 5
Zip + 4
Area code
First 3 phone digits
Last 4 phone digits
Email
Email verification

That 4 pieces of data became 15 fields. That’s a significant amount of fields for not even collecting credit cards.

How short could this form be?

Name (first and last)
Address line 1
Address line 2 (optional)
Zip code (if you know the zip, you know the city and state)
Phone number
Email address

A total of 6 fields.

The argument will come into play that development wants two fields for the name so it fits nicely into the database. Or, they might need the phone number in xxx-xxx-xxxx format (or (xxx) xxx-xxx or xxxxxxxxxx, or (xxx) xxxxxx, etc) therefore they want 3 fields.

If someone is giving you personal information, your system should do the heavy lifting. You should parse out the names. You should be able to strip out extra characters from the phone number to make it fit into your database (the same can be said for credit cards. If someone is willing to give you their credit card - TAKE IT. You should be able to parse out the info on the back end for merchant processing).

Forms can look intimidating. Lessen the impact on how the form looks by lessening the fields and do work on the backend. If someone is willing to give you information, then process it. Don’t error out the page and make them resubmit the information so that it’s easy for you to put into the database. Parse, cleanse, do whatever is necessary with the data so that it’s easy for the consumer.

Forms are one of the least optimized pages on the web.

The most expensive business proposition is often forming new customer relationships. Ensure that your pags are friendly, look friendly, act friendly, and have a high convesion rate.

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