• Ryan Elkins
• Jul 9,2008
• In: Design

Web Form Trends: Sign Up Forms

This is a two part series on trends in the web world when it comes to sign up forms. You know, those forms where new users can register for a site. SmashingMagazine did a survey of 100 websites to review the way these forms are laid out and how they work. Along with just the actual facts they have also pointed out things that work and things that may be problematic.

The goal here is to increase completion percentage – how many people that go to your sign up page will actually sign up?

Web Form Design Patterns: Sign-Up Forms

Part 1 focuses on the form layout. It goes over fields, alignment, and general style of the form itself.

Web Form Design Patterns: Sign-Up Forms, Part 2

Part 2 is a sort of a grab bag. It goes over a lot of the miscellaneous issues that weren’t covered in part 1. Hints, validation, the use of captcha, etc is all covered here.

To really make use of this it would be necessary to have some sort of idea what your completion rate was over a certain period of time, which would require some sort of analytics. From there, it would be possible to start tweaking things over time. Change something and see how it affects completion rates over a significant period of time.

Unfortunately, the forms that I would like to see optimized the most are the ones least likely to care. Namely, bill pay services. It just seems like they don’t really care if you sign up for some sort of e-payment plan. I don’t know how many I have signed up for – be it credit cards, gas, cable, electricity – they generally are all a bit substandard.

The one to cause me the most pain, however, was when I filled out a job application online. It was long – REALLY long. I stopped for a while to do something else and when I came back and finished it, and then hit submit I was informed that my session had expired and it started me over from scratch. WTF.  I seriously had to consider how much I cared about this job opportunity. I don’t even know why they needed a valid session to submit all this info anyways. Boy, what a nuisance.

Let’s go out there and make the internet a little less painful, shall we?