Webdesigners, what do you think of the following kind of webpage design?
Asked by
flo (
13313
)
August 30th, 2013
I would say 99% of the forms I’ve seen the questions are all in one page, even if they are “channeling” kind of questions, you don’t have to click “continue” after each question.
I think most people decide to fill out the “Contact Us” or other forms after they make sure they have all the info that is required, or if the form is way too long for that paricular time/too long, etc.
Is this user unfriendly one page per question just the old way of doing it?
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7 Answers
I’m not really sure what you mean. Most “contact us” forms I see nowadays are a simple, name/email/message type of deal, with no further questions. Can you provide an example of what you’re talking about?
Without a link I’m hard pressed to answer, but I’d be very annoyed by a design that only gave me on input per page and I had to keep clicking through. Also if you use valid XHTML 1.0 strict or HTML5 markup on something like a contact us form or a registration form, your browser can read what each input in the form is asking for, and if it knows what you usually type in for the requested info, like first name, last name, address, city and so forth, it will pre-populate the form for you. It would be possible to use client side scripting to make that work with a multipage form, but far more complex and less intuitive for the end user.
I do whole checkout pages for ecommerce in a single page, with all the billing info needed, checkbox for shipping address same and if that’s not checked, inputs for shipping address, shipping method desired, credit card info, everything but the order confirmation page, which can’t be displayed till credit card info is submitted to the merchant bank’s computer. It can be split up into one page for each chunk of that info, but hardly any of my customers want that and I don’t recommend it. No matter how simple you make it, lots of people bail out before entering all their info in a shopping cart page. Often, like with me, they just want to find out how much shipping will cost. But make it as easy as possible and you get less abandoned carts.
I feel like the BBC is a rather isolated example here. That’s really awful, but I really don’t think it’s the norm.
It’s amazing how many big corporate websites stink like 3-day-old fish. I was trying to find out on Verizons site when FIOS will be offered in my area. Even though I was logged it, it kept asking me if I was an existing customer or new customer. When I clicked existing customer, it took me back to the login screen then looped right back through the same scenario again. I finally found a link to order FIOS and clicking it brought up a screen saying this function is not available on this website. Contact the business office. Do that, and they tell you (after you finally get past the robotic agent that can’t help you with ANYTHING but insists on trying all imaginable things before letting you talk to a human) that you have to go to their website to do that.
@ETpro Heavens! Let’s hope this is something they are looking at improving.
@DeanV
I don’t know if it is isolated.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/contact/
How is it that “CC me” is not a standard feature in all the the contact us forms? How do people present proof in court etc.?
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