I was delighted to be invited to the WebExpo conference in Prague, and even more delighted to have a chance to talk about my favourite topic: better forms.
Specifically, this time I decided to focus on how to save money by fixing forms.
I started by talking about a form in three layers: service design, content design, and interaction design.
The service design challenges can be the hardest ones but also the areas with the biggest cost savings. Making people answer questions to give you answers that you don’t really need is expensive for them, but it’s even more expensive for you: more to implement, more to maintain, more costs to store the unnecessary data, and more opportunities to save inaccurate data that may cause you problems in the future.
Content design is often overlooked when people think about forms, but changes to the way you phrase your questions and the answer options can make a huge difference to the people who have to answer the form. I focused on a problem that I find in many forms, the yes/no questions. I’ve even written specifically about that: No yes/no questions
And in a conference where many attendees are developers, I couldn’t ignore interaction design, starting with another favourite topic: buttons. There’s a blog post for buttons too: Basic best practices for buttons
View the recording of “How to save money by fixing forms” on SlideLive (requires giving an email address).
Many thanks to the Webexpo team, the attendees, and all the speakers for a great conference