Experience Planner

The Challenge

One of my clients is starting work on a global redesign of their registration form, across every site they own. It’s a big deal, and it has the possibility of being very contentious. Multiple areas of the company have a vested interest in the questions, so we need to have a strong justification for every change we recommend.

The client is mostly concerned about getting the right mix of questions that let us gather good, useful information about our visitors without causing drop-off. But this is also a good opportunity to build in some usability best practices that have been missing.

Since our client is awesome, they agreed to run a test. We’re going to design 3 versions of the form, probably representing small/medium/long, and see which one hits a sweet spot in terms of gathering information without causing drop-off. We’ll run all 3 forms at the same time, randomly serving 1 of the 3 to each visitor who registers.

The Solution

Thankfully, Luke Wroblewski just published a book on web form design called… Web Form Design. I picked up a copy and read it during a few short plane flights this week.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I saw Luke speak at this year’s IA Summit and even joined his lunch table discussion group, and I think pretty much everything he says is spot on. So I was predisposed to like the book. But it still exceeded my expectations.

For me, the book follows a perfect outline — exactly the format I want every professional book to follow. It deconstructs the issue of web form design into 14 discrete issues (e.g. “Help Text” “Inline Validation” and “Gradual Engagement”), and focuses one chapter on each issue. Then, within each chapter, he breaks out the various problems and solutions that he has observed within that issue.

The end result is extremely readable, and the content is very strong. Luke makes recommendations based on hard data, common-sense observations, and his own UX expertise. Also, the book comes with a digital version that links to a Flickr library of all the images he used. So it’s easy to take his work and repurpose it for your own presentations.

While researching, I also came across a couple of interesting articles on Smashing Magazine. They did their own research into the most common ways web forms are done. You can read Part 1 and Part 2 here. For me, it’s only somewhat interesting, since it’s reporting more raw data and less actual UX expertise.

Conclusion

I’ll update later with results from the form design project. Stay tuned.

In the mean time, let me recommend a site I just found called Wordle. You can enter in any text you want, or paste in a URL, and it will create an attractive word cloud based on the words in your text! You can even customize the appearance of the cloud. It’s kind of fun, but it’s also useful if you want to quickly pull out the words most commonly used in a source file.

I pasted in the text from Web Form Design and here’s what I got: