A lot of the time on the web, website forms are neglected. Whether you’re filling out a form to sign up for your favourite clothing range, or your favourite gadget website, we’ve all had that gut feeling when we see an ugly looking form, and think to ourselves “Do I really have to fill out all those fields?”.

I’ve listed the Top 3 Tips For Building a Great Form that will give you some idea of why just giving that little bit more attention to detail could make that difference.

1. Thought out form objective

Possibly the most important point to focus on before you think about when building a great form. Let’s start with an example that you may all be familiar with – a simple registration form. The key objective would be simply to make the user fill out the registration form successfully. By doing this you’ll need to make sure that the user isn’t ‘put off’ by any distractions, long-forms or fields they simply don’t want to fill in (Onboarding have some great examples and constructive feedback on user onboarding for popular brands and products).

You’ll need a simple layout, with minimal fields the user needs to fill out, along with a clear end to the form – a shiny submit button. I’ve listed an example below:

2. Minimal form input effort

We’re all pretty lazy when it comes to filling out forms, we might not realise it but when we’re presented with a much more refined form structure it’s like a breath of fresh air.

3. Build a user experience

So, you have a well-designed form and the general structure, now you should really think about the user experience. Clear, uncomplicated sections, form fields, labels and buttons are not all that make forms a pleasurable experience. Some great UX examples can be found at Onboarding. See below for an example of uncomplicating a form field:

Making the process quick, smooth and easy is your goal. This will ultimately decide on the user signing up, buying a product, subscribing to your newsletter, etc. Sometimes, you will need detailed information from a client/customer, but this can be done further down the line of the registration/checkout process.

Following these few pointers should hopefully help you out when making decisions on form building in the future. When you think about either designing a form or working with a company who is designing your website or form for you, make sure that you think about that extra bit of time needed. They’re an integral part of converting users on your site into customers and clients.

If your form needs a tune up because it isn’t getting many enquiries or you’d like any help with building a great web form in your next exciting project, just drop us a line.