Long web forms could be scary for users and they could encourage clients to fly away from your site. Although that, it is difficult to make them shorter, specially if you need all that information you are requesting.
Mapoot is a real estate listings website with focused on Germany. Designing the property posting web form, we had the problem that the whole thing was too long. We tested with a few users and it was amazing to see the reaction of the people, all making gestures like "pufffff" and "wow, this is going to take time".
Then we decided to split the form into 4 steps:
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It’s important to label steps properly, so users could get an idea of what’s coming next. Splitting the long form was a great improvement in the website design: although the process of placing a new property in Mapoot was as long as before, users were not complaining!
where’s the rest of the article? or was that ‘it’?
Hi Lowell,
I wanted to make a point on how splitting a form could make it look shorter. If you are interested in web form design, let me pass you 2 articles I wrote before:
“Preventing Errors Filling Forms” on how making a web form easy to fill could encourage users to fill all the information you require.
Read it here: http://www.designvsart.com/blog/2008/01/12/preventing-errors-filling-forms/
“Simple Forms Improve Usability” with another example of bad design.
Read it here: http://www.designvsart.com/blog/2007/11/26/simple-forms-improve-usability/
Feel free to share another link!
Thanks!
Alex
It was always a toss up for me as to whether a long form should be one page or split up into separate pages. Of course the long form looks daunting to fill out, but I was worried breaking it up into pages would mean added steps, more hoops to make the user jump through.
Besides your test users expressing more displeasure with a long form, it would be interesting to see the differences in form abandonment rates tested on real traffic.