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Impact of Removing Registration
In Sign Up Forms Must Die, I advocated ways to get people engaged and interested in Web applications and services without requiring an explicit sign-up form. In many cases, registration is an obstacle that prevents people from exploring and engaging with an application.
Since then, several people have asked what the impact of removing registration would be on content quantity (does removing sign-up forms increase participation) and content quality (will quality go down if registration is not required). Not too long ago, the community news site, Topix published details behind their experience killing sign-up forms.
The results?- Since removing registration, volume has exploded and passed a quarter-of-a-million aggregate posts
- And the quality of posts? The post kill-rate (removal) actually dropped -hovering below 2%. This is less than half of the number incurred when registration was in place.
Check out the full details on the Topix blog.
Tags: forms, balance, metrics
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10% Sign up Improvement with one Change
Marcello Calbucci recently shared some details behind the design of the Sampa sign up form. Sampa is a free Web site service that requires users to register before they set up a site and saw a 10% increase in sign-ups with one change: removing CAPTCHA.- The Sampa sign in form has been through 4 or 5 different versions
- At one point Sampa asked about 15 questions
- ampa A/B tested several sign up form scenarios over the last 2 years to determine the right combination that yields maximum conversion and retention
- CAPTCHA was used to prevent automated bots from creating hundreds of thousands of fake accounts
- Sampa removed CAPTCHA 99% of the time through a set of tests and rules
- The result: 9.2% improvement on our conversion rate
For more details check out the article by Marcello.
Tags: forms, Web conventions, metrics
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Web Symposium: Web Form Design Best Practices
In my Web Form Design Best Practices talk at the Higher Education Web Symposium in Philadelphia, PA, I walked thorugh the importance of Web forms and a series of design best practices culled from live to site analytics, usability testing, eye-tracking studies, and best practice surveys.
My Slides from the talk:
Best Practices For Web Form Design (4.1 MB PDF)
Some of the topics I discuss and provide patterns for are: label alignment, required form filed, input field sizes, content grouping, primary & secondary actions, help text & tips, dyanmic help systems, inline validation, error messages, progress indicators, success messaging, progressive disclosure, gradual engagement, tabbing, flexible data inputs, smart defaults, paths to completion, selection dependent inputs, and more...
For more on Form Design...
Check out Luke's book about Web form usability, visual design, and interaction design considerations: Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks.
Tags: forms, guidelines, interaction design, visual communication, usability, UI components
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Gourmet Experiences on a Fast-Food Budget
In his Cooking up Gourmet Experiences on a Fast-Food Budget keynote at the Higher Education Web Symposium in Philadelphia, PA Jared Spool discussed it takes to make great experiences without a big budget.- What is behind a gourmet experience: meticulous preparation, quality ingredients, and a creative approach.
- How do the best teams create design? Jared researched teams that delivered great designs and teams that tried to deliver great designs but failed. All the usability issues they found could be traced to someone missing key pieces of information. As a result, these people were not able to make appropriate decisions.
- Every usability problem comes from decisions made without the right information.
- A process is a series of steps to get something done. Everyone has a process. A methodology is a formalization of process that is enforced when we need other people to the same thing, multiple times. Dogma is an unquestioned faith independent of any supporting evidence.
- When Jared began his research on design teams, he suspected there was a good methodology or dogma that every organization worked with to achieve consistently great results. It turned out the opposite was true.
- Very few teams had methodology or dogma. Instead, all successful teams had techniques and techniques.
- Techniques are the building blocks of a process. They need to be practiced in order to be mastered and require trial and error. Tricks are quick and easy and perhaps not the best way of doing things but they “just get things done”.
- Best teams did not have a methodology or dogma, but everyone had techniques and tricks that the whole team knew.
- Three core User experience attributes: vision, feedback, and culture.
- Vision: can everyone on the team describe your vision five years from now? Where will your product be?
- Feedback: in the last six weeks, have you spent more than two hours watching someone use your or a competitor’s design?
- Culture: In the last six weeks, have your rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure? Every time there is a design problem, we learn something about users, their needs, and what we should be doing for them.
- Meticulous Preparation: identify if your pages quickly communicate their purpose.
- Quality ingredients: make sure you have content that matters to people.
- Creative approach: look for opportunities to get things to work.
Tags: design organizations, process, user experience
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Product Manager's Dreams
Designer: "Designers visualize Product Managers' dreams. Developers make the dreams work."
Design manager: "Designers turn product manager's responsibilities into things customers dream about."
Tags: design vision
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Sign-Up Form Patterns
Though, I've long advocated that Sign-Up Forms Must Die, for now they remain a staple of online life. Recently Smashing Magazine surveyed the landscape of sign-up forms by looking at patterns in 100 popular Web destinations and their registration forms . The data they extracted is a catalog of existing practices and as a result should not be considered design recommendations. However, it is interesting to see these trends and ultimately if they change over time.- the registration link is most often titled “sign up” (40%) and placed in the right upper corner of a landing page
- registration forms tend to opt for a simplified layout to avoid distractions for users (61%)
- most registration forms are one-page-forms (93%)
- registration forms attract visitors by explaining the benefits of signing up (41%), 28% provide no additional information about benefits
- titles of the input fields are highlighted bold (62%), rendered in color (20%), or plain text (18%)
- right-aligned labels are used on 41% os registration forms surveyed, 30% used top-aligned labels, 29% use left-aligned labels
- 54% of the forms surveyed required at most 5 input fields, 34% of the forms required 6-8 input fields, while 12% required over 9 mandatory input fields
- 78% do not use asterisks to highlight required input fields
- 62% of the forms had no optional fields at all, and 98% of the forms had less than 5 optional fields
- 9% use a progress indicator to show to the users where they currently are and which steps are required
- 86% of registration forms surveyed have input fields arranged vertically
- 57% of the forms surveyed provided help text next to the input field, 10% of help text appears dynamically
- Help text was most often placed: below the field (57%), on the right side of the field (26%), above the field (13%)
- 30% of the forms surveyed displayed only an error-message at the top of the form (no input fields were highlighted), 29% had highlighted input fields with corresponding messages next to the input field, 25% used both error-messages and input fields
- 22% used real-time validation with Ajax, 14% used JavaScript-error warnings
- Only in 18% of the cases it was necessary to confirm the e-mail
- In 72% of the cases it was necessary to confirm the password
- 52% of the sites don’t use captcha
- A Cancel button was used only in 8% of the cases
- Left-aligned submit-buttons (56%), centered Submit buttons (26%), right-aligned Submit buttons (17%)
Complete articles on Smashing Magazine:
For more on Form Design...
Check out Luke's book about Web form usability, visual design, and interaction design considerations: Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks.
Tags: forms, Web conventions
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Web Form Design: Goodreads Review
On the Goodreads site, Marty DeAngelo posted a detailed review of my new book Web Form Design:
"Good or bad, there aren't many books that I can use for my job that I go through quickly. There's just something about a limit to my absorption of information from these books that makes me take my time to get through them. However, that was not a problem with this book. Chock full of good information, Wroblewski manages to make it a quick, easy and yet informative read that only took me 2 days cover-to-cover.
For anyone that works on the web, forms are going to be something you deal with at one time or another. Usually, it's an experience in trying to get a form to do what YOU want it to do without regard to what the customer really wants or needs. However, I've been working on a bunch of projects recently where I really need to consider what the customer wants because one of our main goals is to get users to register, and I know how fickle they are when it comes to signing up for things. So, this book was not only interesting but very timely.
The best thing about the book is how well written it is. It's fairly simplistic in getting its point across, using a lot of illustrations to really drive home the points that the author is trying to get across. His tone and personality really mesh with how the book is presented, making it almost conversational as he explains some of the major concepts and then delves deeper into the best ways to develop and present forms.
Each chapter is relatively short (about 8 - 21 pages), but chock full of good advice. The succession will also help people trying to make their forms better work their way into more and more elaborate ways of creating 'bulletproof' forms. While you won't get as far in-depth as you might need on any given topic (I wanted to know more about error messaging, a personal anathema right now) or much about the coding of the pages, the principals and direction are dead on.
As I said, the language and personality Wroblewski - whose credentials include former Lead Usability Designer at eBay, founding member of Interaction Design Association (IxDA) and current "Senior Principal of Product Ideation and Design" at Yahoo! - create a more approachable presentation than you might think from someone who is one of the leaders in usable design. Less teacher and expert-on-high and more friendly "have a beer and chat" usability guru, I found it easy to get sucked into one chapter and not look back until 3 chapters later.
The examples he uses are also top-notch. Granted, he has a great body of work to pull from, but he does a great job of using examples from a breadth of industries and user types -- everything from Fortune 500 banks to e-commerce to new Web 2.0 social networks are represented, showing that good form design isn't for any single audience. The illustrations are also well-placed in showing principles and comparisons between different methods, adding to the ease with which someone can learn how to build the better form.
His information comes from more than just his own experiences, though. Several key studies provide relevant data that give credence to the ideas presented here. He's not afraid to say, 'It depends' when it does or to say that while something might be a bad idea for the most part (and here's way), that you couldn't make it work in some limited situation. He offers what seems to be the best way to accomplish certain things within a form, without putting his own personal feelings into it (well, for the most part - and when he does, it's always in a humorous manner).
And this is a book that anyone can use - not overlay-laden with technical terms, it's instead a thorough but amazingly understandable set of observations, suggestions and instructions on how to make the forms you are creating eminently more usable for all those involved - but most especially for the customers or visitors of the sites we're building. I needed it to answer a couple specific questions I had, but it quickly opened up other paths and solutions for me I wasn't yet considering.
At this point, I have to say that this is probably one of the best UX books I've read. It might not be as thorough and ground-breaking as Saffer's "Designing for Interaction" or Zeldman's "Designing with Web Standards", but for the specificity of the topic, it really does a great job a covering all of the bases and giving real-world, actionable examples and guidance. A great buy - and I think that if you , you also get a PDF version (great because it's searchable."
-By Marty DeAngelo from Goodreads
You can get Web Form Design from Rosenfeld Media. You can also get it at Amazon.com, but for the same price, Rosenfeld Media includes a nicely formatted digital version.
Tags: forms, Web applications
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Event & Discount Code: An Event Apart, San Francisco
On August 18th I’ll be speaking at An Event Apart in San Francisco, CA about Web Application Hierarchy.
I'll walk through how people parse Web pages and the implications of this behavior for designers. Specifically, using the principles of visual hierarchy to communicate key information about the purpose and use of Web applications.
If you are interested in going, feel free to use the discount code: AEALUKE for savings on the event cost.
Official Description
When a potential customer makes it to one of your pages, what will they do? Do you want them to sign up, share knowledge, buy something, or dive deeper into your content? Don’t leave these decisions to chance. Learn how people scan web pages and how to guide users through key content and actions using visual hierarchy to construct meaningful, prioritized page layouts. Includes multiple before and after examples.
Hope to see some of you there!
Tags: visual communication, visual design, Web applications
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Web Form Design: Interactions Review
In the July/August 2008 issue of Interactions magazine, Philip Haine (founder of Obvious Design) wrote a detailed review of my new book Web Form Design. Here's a preview:
"A well-designed form is barely noticeable. But that doesn’t mean the design process is. Like most design problems, achieving a concise design that seems, in retrospect, obvious, requires much work. There are myriad factors to consider, each with multiple alternatives, each with its pros and cons. Should we have one long form or a sequence of short forms? Should help be provided in-line with the form controls, on the side, or on top? At what point should we validate fields and deal with errors? You could fill a book with the subtleties of form design.
Fortunately, Wroblewski has written that book. Drawing on years of experience designing for eBay and Yahoo, he has cataloged the major considerations involved in creating forms. He walks the difficult line between writing for novice and veteran designers. Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks is an excellent guide for new or de facto designers and a handy reference for veterans. Wroblewski has done the dirty work for us in researching what works best. By following his advice, we—and our users—can quickly and competently get through the forms and onto the fun stuff."
Check out the full review in the printed version of Interactions magazine or access the PDF of the review if you are an ACM member.
You can get Web Form Design from Rosenfeld Media. You can also get it at Amazon.com, but for the same price, Rosenfeld Media includes a nicely formatted digital version.
Tags: forms, Web applications, interaction design, visual design, interface
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Web-Conscious Content Experiences
In the July/August 2008 issue of Interactions magazine, I wrote an article on Web-Conscious Content Experiences about how content pages can be better optimized for the Web ecosystem. Here's a preview:
"In today’s search-driven, social, and distributed Web, people are finding their way to content through an increasing number of distinct experiences. Content-aggregator sites like digg and del.icio.us, display surfaces like Facebook and MySpace, content creation sites like blogs and wikis, search engines like Google and Yahoo!, and communication tools like email and instant messaging are all responsible for an increasing amount of traffic to Web content pages.
But when people arrive, the Web page they get isn’t optimized for these circumstances. Instead, the vast majority of content pages online remain more concerned about their place within a website rather than their place on the Web. These pages are designed as if they were primarily accessed from a website’s home page or a carefully thought-out selection from the site’s information architecture.
While these are all worthwhile considerations, they go only so far. In fact, studies conducted on content pages have shown that too much of an insular approach can actually prevent sites from achieving their goal of increased engagement and returning customers. So instead of presenting content only as part of a specific website, consider presenting it as part of the entire Web as well."
Check out the full article in the printed version of Interactions magazine or access the PDF of the article if you are an ACM member.
Tags: context, guidelines, interaction design, Web OS, user experience, patterns
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