Web forms can a valuable tool for gathering information from your web visitors, but they can also be a gateway – or perhaps more accurately a closed gate – preventing or at least discouraging successful  Form Conversions, whereby users complete the form to either register on your site, or complete their purchase checkout process.  Because of this, forms can often be the most important pages in assisting (or limiting) the success of your web site.

Inevitably, some percentage of your website visitors will simply quit without completing a form. Why is that? Some quit because they’re really not that interested in your product or service, some just because of the unavoidable fickleness of human nature, but many of them quit because of the poor layout and functionality of the forms themselves, which is an easily preventable problem.

The goal of course is always to minimize the percentage of users who abandon the form and so maximize your user registrations and/or sales. This can be easily achieved if you follow the steps outlined below:

1.    Use a Web Analytics Tool

The first step is to perform a web analysis of your site to statistically measure visitor behavior, and so determine exactly how many of your site visitors are abandoning the registration or purchase process, and at what stage(s) they are doing so. To do this, you’ll need a web analytics tool. There are many third party web analytics tools to choose from, both free and paid, depending on your needs. Some of these products are much easier to use than others, so if you aren’t already using one check out this list of the Top 10 Web Analytics Tools.

Once you have installed such a tool and used it to accumulate some useful visitor behavior stats, you can utilize a powerful feature that some of these tools provide called Funnel Analysis to determine what percentage of users complete each stage of the registration/checkout process, i.e. advance from one page to another on your website, including your form page(s). Many people are shocked at how many of their visitors abandon the process at the form stage, so it’s really important to conduct a thorough web analysis using your web analytics tool to ensure your forms are well laid out, helpful, and easily readable, to give your visitors every incentive to complete the purchase/registration process.

2.    Keep Your Forms Short

Only ask your website visitors for the information you really need on the form. If your visitors are typical, they’re in a hurry, so don’t make them register on your site unless it’s absolutely necessary – give them the option to use a guest registration if possible.

You should also allow your visitors to complete a purchase or registration without a lot of optional fields cluttering the form, but if you must include such fields on the form, make sure it’s obvious that they are optional (a clearly visible asterisk is ok, but a visual cue such as a different font color or emphasis on the field prompt, or even including the word optional next to the field is much better). If the user might want to enter some additional information later, make it easy for them to do so by e.g. providing a link to their personal profile in your welcome email so they can easily update it.

Remember, the visitor’s primary goal is to get past the form as quickly as possible with the minimum of hassle to get to whatever it is that they were registering for or purchasing, so make sure your form helps them with that goal without wasting their time (your chosen web analytics tools should be helpful here).

3.    Make Using the Form Easy

Make it as easy as possible for your visitors to complete the form and move on to the next part of the process. For example, many sites ask registrants to create a unique user name. If at all possible let them use their email instead (which is guaranteed to be unique and memorable), but if you really want to offer them a user name choice, make sure that you give them feedback immediately on the form if that user name is available or not – otherwise they will spend time filling in the form, click the “Go” button, then get frustrated because the user name is unavailable (and maybe give up at that point).

Similarly, give them immediate feedback on any other information that needs to be in a particular format (for example phone numbers), but also don’t ask them to conform to arbitrary formatting requirements (e.g. “no spaces or dashes”). Instead be flexible by converting whatever they enter on the form (as long as it’s reasonable) to the format you want.

Also, don’t make users resubmit the form multiple times because they made one tiny error on one field. If there are any errors on the form they submitted, make sure you make it really obvious to the user what those errors are. Ideally put the error message in simple and easily understood English in a large, bold, red font next to the field in question, and/or at the top of the form.

One other essential requirement is to preserve whatever information that a user has already typed into a form – even if it contains errors, or if they hit the back button or perform any other similar action. If you don’t then you’re absolutely guaranteed to lose a lot of frustrated users this way.

Finally, make sure that you group related fields together on the form, and make sure that they’re linked in sequence – I’ve had sites where pressing the tab key on the Street Address field took me to the Age field, not the City field. Needless to say this is very frustrating for the user and will discourage many of them enough to abandon the form.

4.    Make It Really Obvious What To Do Next

This should be a no brainer, but you’d be amazed at how many web forms I’ve seen which don’t make it really obvious about how to complete the form and go to the next step of the process. A simple line of explanation at the top (and sometimes bottom) of the form is helpful and encouraging. For example: “Fill in all the fields marked with an asterisk * and click on the Next button below to complete your registration” would be a good simple explanation to the user.

On some sites it’s even hard to find the “Go” button to submit the form, which will definitely reduce your form conversions. If you don’t have a really big, obvious, highly visible, concise (and preferably brightly-colored) button at the bottom of the form saying “Register” or “Continue Purchase” or “Next”, or something very similar, then you should include one.  If your web analytics tools is showing that many people complete the form fields but don’t click on the “Go” button, then that’s a sign that the button is either hard to locate or is worded in such a way as to confuse and/or de-motivate your visitors.

Make sure that your links to the form match the title and purpose of the form. Nothing is more guaranteed to confuse a visitor than clicking on a link for a specific purpose only to arrive at a page that indicates it’s for a different purpose. If you need to use a single form page for two different processes (e.g. a form to enter name and address information), make sure that you make the title and other information on the form equally applicable to both processes – otherwise you should really separate them into two separate form pages, even if they are otherwise identical.

Finally, while it’s sometimes necessary to have a “Back” button to take the visitor one stage back in the process, or a “Cancel” button to cancel the process, those buttons should be relatively small and less obvious compared to the “Go” button – you don’t want to give your visitors any more reason to abandon the form than absolutely necessary, so remove all unnecessary clutter and distractions that aren’t directly guiding them to complete the process.

5.    Make Your Forms Look Good

Many companies lavish money on the design and usability of their sites, and yet somehow all of that is forgotten when it comes to their forms. Yes, forms are different from other pages (and in many cases are created by web developers, not web designers or interaction designers), but you can still apply the elements of style and layout to a form as well as the usability elements described above.

Simple things, such as creative use of colors and fonts, aligning fields, making the fields big enough (but not excessively large), and plenty of white space around the form elements are essential to a really good looking form. If your visitors enjoy the experience of looking at the form, it’s more likely they’ll enjoy completing it. So make sure you have your web designer modify the form layout once you’ve selected the relevant fields to make sure it satisfies the same esthetic requirements of any other page on your site, and you’ll increase the number of form conversion.

6.    Test, Test, Test

If you do nothing else with your forms, at least do this. Make sure you test every possible path through the form process from the perspective of the different categories of typical visitor (try to put yourself in their shoes), including what happens if they make a mistake of some kind. Also ask a few people (colleagues, friends or relatives) who are typical of each of those visitor categories try out the process to get their feedback – especially someone who is not familiar with filling out web forms! Thorough testing is the single best way to ensure that all your forms are as simple, friendly and effective as possible.

Finally, make sure you review the published forms periodically using your web analytics tool to ensure that you’re catching any other roadblocks or other problems that might still be causing your visitors to abandon the process.

Execute these steps regularly on your website, and you can be sure to minimize friction on your form processes, and maximize your form conversions and your registrations or revenue.