smashingmagazine.com — If you want to maximize the revenue of your service you need to maximize completion rates of your web forms. Unless you have some revolutionary ideas to impress your visitors at first glance, it is not enough to simply enable users to sign up on your site.
Jul 8, 2008 View in Crawl 4
colorjamJul 8, 2008
Excellent article.. Love all the stats about web forms..
bitt3nJul 9, 2008
also what % puts the signup form on the home page?
KevinPaffrathJul 10, 2008
I love when web designers high-light fields. Or better yet, make it simple enough to where I can just tab through and fill it out.
swaters210Jul 10, 2008
As a young person who is working his first job as a web developer, I like to keep my forms simple(no hover, focus effects etc) and use red asterisks to mark required fields; which would be generated after the form is checked for validation. If it's a short form and only a few input fields have to be checked for validation, then I would indicate required fields with a red asterisks which would be generated before the form is checked for validation. I ran into this problem the other day, "should I indicate what is required with a red asterisk to mark required fields..it would only clutter the design? now that I look back at it, I should have colored the associated labels with a different color (perhaps red) and put a disclaimer at the top , then use the asterisk after the form is checked for validation .There's a lot to consider when it comes to designing a web form, because it has to be simple and as intuitive as possible for the vistor. Also , things like friendly validation error messages have to be taken in account as well. I haven't begun to tackle spam prevention yet and I think methods like captcha text are stupid/obtrusive/ugly yet necessary when you design web forms - there should be a better way. I bet someone could write a whole book on this subject!
Closed AccountJul 10, 2008
seems pointless without metrics on the drop-off rates
megatonJul 10, 2008
By golly, they have!Such gems as The Design of Everyday Things, and Emotional Design are two easy readers on the subject...
megatonJul 10, 2008
I see what you did there...
crfsrgJul 10, 2008
Nice article,but a bit over my head!
stygiansonicJul 10, 2008
Thanks, I've been debating some of the issues presented in this article and it's definitely helpful to see statistics showing what's "most popular", even if that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the best way.