If designed well, Web forms provide valuable information; if not, they may scare users away.

Here are a few tips on creating an effective web form.

1. Design with a purpose

Keep it short and simple and eliminate elements that are not absolutely necessary. Questions you can ask yourself: What are you asking? Why?

2. Use short, clean description when necessary

You may need to explain why you are collecting certain information on your form, ie. phone number and email addresses. Providing short, clean descriptions not only help reduce user confusion, it also ensures that the data is accurate and correctly collected.

3. Be friendly

Make sure the wording in your form is friendly and user-oriented – pretend you’re actually taking with your user.

4. Divide your form into bite-sized sections

If you are asking for quite a bit of information from the user, try to break the form into small, easily understood sections. You can also consider spreading your form out across multiple pages and add a progress bar across the top so users know how much they have left. An example of this would be an ecommerce order form.

5. Meaningful error messages

Your error messages needs to be helpful and clear. Specify in the message which field caused the error and highlight the label and/or field itself.

6. Proper way to say “bye”

Setup your form so that after the user clicks the Submit button, it sends the user to a custom page that thanks them for the submission and they should be expecting a reply from you in the near future.

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