What is good form writing?

In previous posts in this series, we’ve covered a little bit about how to make your forms work well for your respondent, but there’s more to a good web form than just making sure the form is easy to use. The form is about communicating with your respondent, not just about getting the information you want. The words and language you use on your form set the tone for your interactions with your site’s visitors, so they should reflect your intention of that interaction.

Clear, concise, just-in-time information

In an ideal world, you would be able to provide ample information to your respondents using only descriptive field labels. In reality, sometimes you really do need to explain options or meanings. In these cases, the best strategy is to display the necessary information as close to the question as possible. For example, provide clarification in a short description above or below the question. If you need to display a lot of help information (more than a few words), consider dynamic hints. Dynamic hints disrupt the flow of the form less than large chunks of help text. In FormAssembly, dynamic hints are available by entering the hint text in the “Contextual Help” section on the Properties panel.

Have a conversation with your respondent

Think of your forms as an important mode of communication with your online visitor. You’re not just extracting information, but building a relationship. How can you use this in your forms? Instead of making short, terse labels, consider how you can turn the question into a full sentence using common language.

For example, this feels fairly impersonal.

This, however, feels much friendlier and more personal.

If you find it difficult or think it feels unprofessional to make changes like these to you forms, one author suggests reading your form aloud. By doing this, you’ll get a better understanding of the way your visitor will experience the form when seeing it for the first time.

We’d love to hear your comments about these ideas, ideas you have for improving your forms, or other feedback on FormAssembly. Feel free to leave comments below, or check out the UserVoice forum.

Welcome to this week’s update on what’s been going on here at FormAssembly.

Thanks for your input

Thank you to those of you who participated in the survey we posted after updating the Forms page. We’re pleased to report that the vast majority of those who completed the survey reported that you found the new interface “Really easy” or “Pretty easy” to use.

We appreciate the comments and thoughts you shared with us, and we’ll continue tweaking the application so that it better serves your needs.

Updates to Pay-As-You-Go Notifications

We’ve made a small tweak to notifications for our Pay-As-You-Go subscribers. If you’re on the Pay-As-You-Go plan, you’ll now receive automatic notification when your account gets down to 10 credits. If your account gets down to 5 credits, you’ll receive another automatic email each time a credit is used. Thus, if you let your account run all the way down to 0, you will receive 6 emails total.

Don’t forget to check out our recent blog posts on ways you can make your forms more usable for your visitors. We’d love to hear your thoughts and strategies for improving web forms.

What else makes a good form?

As a continuation of last week’s post, today I’m writing about a few more usability issues you might want to consider as you build your forms.

Choose the correct input format

When you use the Form Builder, you can choose from many different types of answers. Before you choose your answer type, think about what would make it easiest for your visitors to answer the question. If there are only a couple valid answers, don’t use free text inputs. Utilize dropdown menus, radio buttons, and select boxes to help your respondents get through your form faster. For quick reference, here’s a look at the advantages and disadvantages of each type.

Use default values when possible

Once you’ve chosen the answer type for your questions, consider reducing the number of clicks for your visitors by marking default values. In the Form Builder, you can mark any answer of a multiple choice question as a default answer. If you need to use free text inputs, you can prefill the input box with sample text to guide your respondents toward the correct format for their answers.

There is, however, one special case where you should never use default values. If you are asking your respondent to opt-in to anything (e.g. signing up for a newsletter, agreeing to terms of service), you should allow the user to explicitly choose an answer.

Create meaningful partitions

As I mentioned in the previous post, it’s best to keep your forms short. Whenever possible, keep your form to one page and make sure that everything (including the submit button) are visible without scrolling. Use the Form Builder’s sections to visually define meaningful groups of questions. If your form is longer than one screen, use multiple pages instead of requiring the user to scroll. Include “Page 1 of x” on the page so your visitors know where they are in the process. You may want to make this the title of the page. To modify a page’s title in Form Builder, click the Page in the Outline panel.

It’s also good practice to make sure your form is spread out evenly across the pages. Avoid displaying 10 questions on one page and 3 on another, as doing this makes it difficult for visitors to gauge their progress, even if “Page x of x” is at the top of each page.

Focus on your respondent’s experience

These first two posts in the series on getting the most out of your forms have focused on ways to build your form to create a better experience for your respondent. In the next few posts, I’ll cover strategies for writing compelling forms and round up a few ways you can further improve your respondents’ experience with your forms. Stay tuned!

What makes a good web form?

The concept of a form is simple and timeless: your respondents have information, and you want to collect that information. However, everyone has had experience with a poorly designed form at some point. We want to help you and your visitors avoid the same mistakes. In this four-part blog series, I’m going to address some of the most basic aspects of form design that can help you get more out of your forms.

Create a clear path

Make sure your web form leads respondents logically from the beginning to the “submit” button.

Visually, line up all your questions on the left side of the screen (for left-to-right languages). This enables your respondents to scan your form quickly. Avoid distracting images or colors in the background of your form, since these will lead your user’s eye away from the questions. Though you have many layout options in FormAssembly–including inline and grid layouts–it’s best to stick with one-column left-aligned forms unless absolutely necessary.

Conceptually, make sure that your questions flow in a logical order. In general, move from easy questions to difficult questions. Easy questions are name, address, etc.—information respondents don’t really have to think about. Difficult questions are those that ask the respondent to answer in her own words. Think of the easy questions as warm-ups for the big questions that will contain the most important information.

Only display necessary information

Think critically about what information your web form asks for and provides. Instructions should be clear and concise. It’s best to provide instructions immediately before questions (or use the Form Builder’s hints feature), instead of bunched together at the beginning of the form. Only tell your visitors what they truly need to know.

In the same spirit, only ask the questions you really need your respondents to answer. In one study, reducing the number of questions by 64% led to an increase in conversions of 120% for a web form. The message is clear: stay focused on the information you really need. Each form has a purpose, and every question on your form should support that purpose.

Use conditionals to your advantage

One way you can make sure to only display relevant information is to make use of FormAssembly’s conditional settings. Conditional questions allow you to hide information that isn’t relevant to a particular respondent based on his or her previous answers. Using conditionals to hide questions that don’t pertain to the respondent makes your web form less intimidating and more likely to be submitted.

Think about the respondent’s experience

Above all, think about how your respondent interacts with your form. The pleasantness or lack thereof in the experience can make a difference for your form’s performance and the quality of the information you receive.

Since yesterday, the new URL structure mentioned in last Thursday’s post has been operational for new users. As we mentioned previously, the change only applies to forms hosted on FormAssembly.com, not those hosted elsewhere. For forms hosted on FormAssembly.com, the published address used to be

http://app.formassembly.com/forms/view/1234

and is now

http://www.tfaforms.com/1234

FormAssembly will continue to function as it always had, and any forms you published, linked to, or gave out with the original address will continue to work. Again, we made this change to make form URLs easier to type and share, as well as to comply with the recommendations of our annual Salesforce security audit.

We’ll continue rolling out this change gradually over the next few days, but again, you do not need to do anything. Your forms will continue to be accessible at either address.