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No.25 Usability of Registration Forms (February 28, 2005)
Your conversion rate will vary greatly depending on the appearance of registration forms used for purchasing items or requesting information. In this column, we will discuss some of the rules that should be observed when creating registration forms, which have been drawn from repeated usability tests conducted at beBit.
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- Keep entry items to a minimum
For users, it is a real hassle to have to enter text and select items. In particular, beginners tend to dislike using the keyboard to input text. Meanwhile, companies have a tendency to ask for responses on a variety of items in order to obtain user information.
The more questions you ask, the more users you will lose. Once you have carefully reviewed the information you need to obtain via a particular form, you should make a diligent effort to narrow the number of items down to the bare minimum.
In addition to reducing the number of items, your form will be even better if you can incorporate other features that reduce the amount of input required from a user, such as a function (button) that automatically fills in part of an address when the user inputs just their zip code.
- Don't confuse users about what they should input
Another major obstacle for users is fields in which it is difficult to know what to enter or choices that are difficult to understand. These types of fields make it difficult when a user goes to input or select something, and also lead to errors resulting from incorrect entries or choices.
First, you should examine whether there are any elements that could lead to misunderstanding in the item name (title name) of input items or selections. For example, it is unacceptable to give the title name "income" to a field for inputting income. To avoid any misunderstanding, you should clearly indicate whether you are asking for "annual income" or "monthly income".
Next, you should add some notes and hints on inputting text that will help the user. That said, since the user will be concentrating on inputting the information, he/she won't notice your explanation if it is placed too far away from the actual input field. For that reason, it is essential to place notes or hints on input directly next to (or underneath) the input field.
For example, by placing a sample entry next to (or under) a field for inputting an address or telephone number, the user will intuitively know what kind of entry to make, such as the format of the entry, whether to use hyphens, and so on. (Ideally, formatting issues or the need for hyphenation should be dealt with on the system side, therefore making such choices transparent to the user.)
Also, when difficult terms are included in the choices available in radio buttons or in check boxes, adding a simple explanation in parentheses just next to each choice will dramatically reduce the percentage of incorrect answers.
- Make it easy to deal with errors
The key to designing registration forms is in how easy it is to recover from errors, once they have occurred.
One commonly seen bad example is the case in which an error message is displayed only at the very top of the page and in small text. As mentioned earlier, users have a tendency to only look at the fields in which they can actually input information. For this reason, if an error occurs but the error message is displayed far from the input field, the user may not even realize an error has occurred or they may not catch the actual reason for the error, which can result in repeated errors.
Another example is the numerous sites that indicate errors with red text in the field label. This method is problematic in terms of accessibility, since users with color blindness cannot tell where the error has occurred. It is important to put some sort of a symbol to indicate that an error has occurred very close to the error and to display an error message that is easy for the user to understand.
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It may not be possible to create a highly usable website simply by improving your registration form. However, the cumulative effect of working diligently on these small areas that make a site easier to use will lead to great results in the end.
Yu Miyasaka, Usability Consultant
beBit, Inc.
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