Fear of the Form – Perceived and Actual Friction

Perceived friction

This is the shock factor of suddenly being faced with a long form. The perception of having to fill out such a long form can be daunting and cause people to change their mind. A solution to this can be to split your form over more than one page.

Solution – Krug your forms

Steve Krug famously said “Get rid of half the words on your page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” Apply this thinking to your forms by reducing the number of fields. ImageScape improved a clients’ conversion rate by 120% by reducing the number of form fields from 11 to 4. And Expedia saved $12 million a year by deleting one form field.

Actual friction

This is the time and trouble it takes to actually *fill in* the form, and it can cause pretty serious abandonment issues if it’s not considered. Things that can slow down – or cause frustration during – the process of form completion include:

• Too many open-ended questions that people have to ponder


• Dropdown menus that don’t include a viable option for the visitor. An example of this is the commonly asked “What industry is your business in?”. If there isn’t an answer available and you don’t provide a way out (like a “Other industry” option) then frustration can occur.


• Captcha security input fields. This is when you have to read strange looking words or letters and type in what you think they say in order to proceed.

Solution – Learn and adapt

One approach to improvement for this scenario is to analyze the results you get and adapt your form accordingly. When looking at your form data, ask yourself:

• Are a high percentage of dropdown results the first option in the list? If so, you should try to make the answers as short and clearly distinguishable as possible. If people can easily/quickly read the option that applies to them, they will be more inclined to select it.


• Are the responses to open-ended questions actually real answers? Or are they nonsense (such as “asdfasdf”) designed to get through the form as quickly as possible? If so, you should make the questions more direct and easier to answer. Examples would be: “Tell us about your biggest marketing problem” (requires a short story as an answer) vs. “What is the biggest barrier to your marketing success?” (which could often be answered in a few words).

TAKE AWAY

The way you ask people to complete form fields is just as important as the information you are asking for. The clearer you ask the question, the more likely you are to get an accurate response.

From: http://thelandingpagecourse.com

Fear of the Form – Perceived and Actual Friction