Web Design and web forms- If you have forms on your website, it is important to apply good web design techniques on your forms for better usability. Once in a while, we will come upon a web form that is just too difficult to fill that we choose to skip altogether. Forms are useful for website owners to gather information that they need from their users. In order to effectively use a form to help you get the data you want, you must first put your users first when it comes to creating and designing your web forms. Here are some tips on how you can improve and make better web forms that your users can fill up with ease.
Good Web Design will use Shorter Forms
Shorter forms are better than longer forms. Most people who surf the internet have the intention of getting more information rather than giving out information. The amount of time that they are willing to use to give information is very little. With that said, your users will skip the entire form if they see a long and detailed form waiting for them to fill up. Compared to a shorter form, people are usually more forgiving and will spend that few minutes to provide you the information. Hence a good web design will incorporate smaller forms. If possible, you may want to spend some time to prioritise your form and pick some of the top information that you need while removing the less important information.
Good Web Design will use Required Fields Options
A form is useless when it doesn’t capture the important data that you need. You may want to consider setting some of the fields on your form to be required so that it is necessary for your user to fill in before they submit. This way you can capture essential information and make your web design work.
Web Design & Field Tabs
Users usually use the Tab button to move to the next field. If you are designing a form, ensure that you have set the tabbing so that flows smoothly through the form fields than jumping all over the form. With the tabbing set, your users will have a better user experience when they fill up the form on your webpage. Field tabs are crucial to a excellent web design
Good Web Design Will Provide Help and Guidance
If your forms contain fields that are not usually found in common forms, then include a short and simple guide for your users so that they know how to fill it in correctly. By providing the guide, you can ensure that your users will provide you the data you need in the format that you want so that you don’t have to manually make the changes later on your database.
Good Web Design Incorporates Feedback For Corrections
When your user happens to miss a step or a field in your form that is required, you should prompt them and provide immediate feedback so that they can make the correction and resubmit. If you don’t provide feedback, your users will have to guess where they have gone wrong which will take a lot of time to figure out their mistakes. This can also result them skipping the form entirely because they simply can’t identify their mistakes.
