The importance of sensical website forms
The most important reason as to the importance of sensical website forms is that you, as a business owner, will lose money if the user has a hard time with it.
Not only will you lose money from potential customers in the moment, but you will also probably lose their business forever.
For a lot of business, that is the difference between closing up shop for good or thriving.
On a more personal note, when I encounter a non-sensical website form, it frustrates me to kingdom-come, because as a professional it is inexcusable.
As a business owner, it is your responsibility, or that of your hired digital marketing agency, to fix and avoid altogether making the customer think any harder than they have to from their perspecitve, not yours.
I’ll share with you an experience I had recently while creating my Yelp profile.
Everything was going great. It was a super simple process to sign up as a Winnipeg marketing company, including a very quick validation email. It guided you through the steps of registration and profile editing smoothly and easily.
There is one field that a business owner can edit, which is an introduction of sorts, including a bit about you.
Easy enough. I clicked on edit. I filled out the fields. I click on Save.
Then the dreaded “Please fill out the required fields below” message appeared.
We’ve all seen this.
As we do when we see this message, I revise the form to look for this invisible required field that I missed.
The first mistake that Yelp did in this case, which is common throughout websites, is that they did not indicate that the fields were required. Don’t you just hate it when you see website forms with no required fields, and then when you go to continue, you get an error message? Even worse is when a website has a few fields indicated that they are required and a few that aren’t, and when you go to save, there is an error telling you that those non-indicated required fields are actually required. The madness!
This is the case of this particular form in Yelp. The last initial field is not indicated as required.
And from my perspective, it is a completely useless field, so why on Earth is it required?
And again, you should be writing your forms from the customers’ perspective, not yours.