How can you get more leads by improving the speed of your forms?

Back

The use of forms in a digital service is common and is an important point of contact with an end user. Indeed, forms are often used to get in touch, edit a customer account or make purchases.

It is therefore important not to overlook this point of contact and to take every opportunity to design it. A form must have the best possible ergonomics to enable it to achieve its objective: to ensure that the user completes the action.

For each UX Design or Ergonomic Audit mission that I carry out in order to improve a service, I rely on the Heuristic criteria of Bastien and Scapin and the principles of Jacob Nielsen - references in the world of UX Design and ergonomics. These criteria applied to a service, contribute to having the best possible ergonomics.

In the articles "Increase contact with a suitable form structure" and "How to reduce your bounce rate by thinking about "form validation"?", I was able to explain that when designing a form, I strongly recommend taking into account:

• Structure (formatting, size, type of fields) and understanding of information (meaning of words, information to help understanding)
• Interactions and ways to facilitate input
• Validation (messages, validation assistance)

This list of recommendations is, in my opinion, essential to the successful understanding, use and effectiveness of your forms.

However, attention must also be paid to the length and speed of a form. A form with too much information requested or that takes too long to enter is likely to discourage the user, at the risk of making him abandon his action.

Do you want to know how to get sufficient input speed on your forms?

 Here is an infographic that summarises good ergonomic practices regarding interactions and facilitation. I'm sure it will be very useful when you create a customer account form for example.

In summary, my minimum recommendation is:

• Use fields that allow quick entry of the expected information (e.g. geolocation for an address, datepicker for a date, etc.)
• Using autocomplete fields
• Use cursor fields for numerical values in addition to keyboard entry
• Put the most popular choices at the top of a select field (drop-down list)
• Pre-select the most popular choice of a select field (drop-down list)
• Make the fields dynamic (display according to the previous answer)
• Activate radio buttons and checkboxes when clicking on their labels

Interactions and ways to facilitate the input of a form are very important, but I recommend to go further to also consider the structure and information and then the validation.