So you have a form, and you want to make it 'good'. Where do you start?
Checklists abound
There are many checklists on the internet. InformIT has a nice general one about web forms. Make use of that and your form should definitely improve. A List Apart always has high quality entries and their article on usable forms is no exception.
Alternatively you could work by steering clear of what makes a form 'bad'. For example, here are 5 ways to make sure that users abandon your forms.
Maybe a government-sanctioned approach is more your liking. The Australian Government Information Management Office, or AGIMO, outlines best practice for putting forms online. The third entry on this page of better practice guidelines is the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO)'s suggestions for producing user-friendly government forms.
In addition to these high level checklists, there is plenty of detailed design advice. For example, there are articles on:
- Whether to use colons;
- Where to place field labels; and
- How to manage character limits in free-text fields.
But how does one make sense of all these different instructions? What's needed is an overarching model that can be used to direct all forms design activities and from which these other guidelines can all be derived.
The 4 Cs of Good Form Design
Formulate Information Design has developed just such a model. We call it the 4 Cs of Good Forms Design. We explain the model this way.
Forms make most people cringe. Why? Because forms are generally boring and painful.
Do they have to be this way? Yes and no.
Forms are a bit like going to the dentist. Both are necessary evils. A good dentist, like a good form, shouldn't cause you any pain. But neither are likely to ever be much fun.
So what is it that makes a form painful? Take a moment to reflect on what you don't like about doing your taxes. Tax forms are a great illustration of what aspects of a form's design make it painful. They are:
- Confusing
- Long
- Burdensome (when was the last time you managed to do your taxes in under 10 minutes?) and
- Often ask seemingly pointless questions.
Therefore, if a form's characteristics are the opposite of these, it should be painless. These positive characteristics are the 4 Cs:
- Clear
- Concise
- Clever and
- Contextual.
The 4 Cs in detail
Let's look at these charactistics in a little more detail.
Clear
In this context, we define clarity as the form-filler understanding, with minimal effort, what to do with the form as the designer intended
.
A very simple illustration appears below. In asking for income information, the survey has failed to say whether the amount should be gross (i.e. before income tax) or net (i.e. after income tax). No doubt the resulting information was a mix of both, rendering it essentially useless.
Clarity is influenced by many things, including but not limited to the language used, layout of the form and actions that are available to the user. When designing these components, you are aiming to marry the purpose of the form with the perspective of the form-filler. It is for this reason that it is so important to have an in-depth understanding of your specific users and the context of use.
Another very important approach for enhancing clarity is consistency. Consistency (e.g. of language, layout and actions) makes the form predictable and learnable. Humans are very much creatures of habit - we act in the future according to our experience of the past. A predictable form therefore fits very well with our way of working.
Concise
Conciseness is about gathering the required information in the most efficient way possible. Consider the question below, from a market research survey:
The more concise way to ask this (double-barrelled) question would be just: How many children do you have?
As another example, this part of an online Medicare form breaks the address into too many input fields.
A word about conciseness and length
Many people mistakenly believe that a good form is short. They aim for the fewest possible number of pages or screens and the least number of questions.
However, quality is not linearly related to length. This is because things that add length, like questions tailored to different circumstances, often improve the experience for the person filling out the form.
Take the following question from a previous Australian e-Tax form as an example. Perhaps attempting to keep the form as short as possible, the designers have created a complex question that I certainly had to read twice:
A less confusing approach would have been to ask the direct questions:
1. Since your last notice of assessment, has your family name changed?
If yes, go to 3.
If no, go to 2.
2. Was your family name shown correctly on your last notice of assessment?
If yes, go to 4.
If no, go to 3.
3. What family name was shown on your last notice of assessment?
4. ...
This may make the form seem longer, but the task of filling it out is greatly simplified. Moreover, when it comes to electronic forms, like e-Tax, space is not at a premium as it is for printed forms.
Therefore, we strongly recommend against using counts of pages, screens or questions as a measure of a form's quality.
Clever
Making the form clever reduces the workload for the user.
The most basic level of cleverness comes from "sequencing". Sequencing is the process of directing the user around the form, skipping questions that don't apply to them. The revised tax question above uses sequencing to ensure that only those people whose family name in the current tax form is different get asked about their family name on the previous tax form.
Forms intelligence really comes into its own in the electronic realm. Here, sequencing can be automated, inputs can be restricted (e.g. number of children must be at least 0) and many other smarts, like calculation of totals, can be built in.
Forms that aren't smart are not only burdensome, they are frustrating. Consider the screenshot below. Here the form has not realised that the address the user entered is exactly the same - barring capitalisation - as the address found in their database. Making this connection would have saved the user a step (and possibly some hair).
Contextual
Finally, a good form provides sufficient context. The form-filler should not have to guess at the meaning of terms or the intention of the designer.
This designer was not doing well when they left out almost half of Australia's states and territories, namely the ACT, Northern Territory and Tasmania. Worse still, they use the terms "metro" and "regional". These terms are well known by market researchers but not consistently understood by the general public. If I live in one of Australia's biggest country towns, Orange, do I answer metro or regional?
A better option may have been capital city versus rest of state. Another option would be to ask for the user's postcode, and let the backend system work out the relevant category.
This example highlights that context is often about providing boundaries and definitions. Ideally, such contextual information is built into the question. In Q1 of the revised tax form example above, context comes from the words "Since your last notice of assessment".
But context can also be about providing information on why certain questions are asked. Often this sort of context is required when the question seems overly intrusive. For example, during their Gmail sign up process, Google provides a good explanation of why they ask for a secondary email account.
Being transparent and inclusive in this way can improve not only data quality, but response rates as well. Recently I declined to complete a Wildnerness Society supporter feedback survey because they asked for a lot of personal information up front, with no explanation of why.
This is just the beginning
In this article we have only just introduced the 4 Cs of Good Form Design. There is much more that can be said about each of the 4 Cs and how different form design principles relate to them.
Over time, we hope to write much more about the 4 Cs and evolve the model. In the interim, we're very interested to know whether you find the 4 Cs a useful approach for critiquing your forms. Please be sure to get in touch with us with any questions, queries, comments and suggestions you have.