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Leading Your Visitors to Failure
By Robert Campbell on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
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Ever fill out a form, hit submit, and say what the heck? Did the form fail to process the data correctly? Did the database fail? Did you type the captcha letters wrong? It was none of the above. It was the design, or should I say usability.
Your secret to building a successful form for your website? Watch a few NEW users fill it out for the first time.
Leading Your Visitors to Fail
Not all things are intuitive, especially to new visitor. Look at this example below.
Can you guess why a new visitor will often fail to complete this form successfully on their first attempt? I’ll give you a hint. It’s the big submit button found under Step 3.
Looking at the screenshot I took as a whole, there is clearly more fields to complete, but new readers are not looking at the second column. They are reading the instructions one step at a time, intuitively going down the first column. What is the last thing to do in the first column? Hit submit, and then we watch the form fail. It’s the case of, obvious to those that use it all the time. A better form would be, obvious to all.
Have you ever watched a visitor try one of your forms for the first time? It can be an enlightening experience! Give it a try, you might even want to stop using a captcha.
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Category: Usability & Design Tags: fail, forms, new visitor, usability, visitors
Its definitely a great idea to watch others and see how they approach your website. I know one time I had a weird error that a user pointed out on one of my websites, basically no one was able to signin because of it, ooopps lol.
Till then,
Jean
Great help also include this to my design
Yup, gotta have that big call to action. Makes a big difference.
Good reminder. Thanks for your tips. I am going to apply this to my blog.
Time-honoured wisdom for sure.
You can also try standing over people’s shoulders watching as they try to use your website. Don’t let yourself say, “NO, CLICK THERE!” at all!
Guy.