- User Experience -
- June 22nd, 2008,
- 1 Response
The perfect sign-up form
- 22 June
So here we are, browsing a new website you came across. Everything seems to be lovely so why not joining the community, sharing, giving... And all of that vowels-like stuff. Unfortunately joining sometimes can a big pain in the neck, why? Sign-up forms.
You would ask yourself How stupid one can be not to go through a signup form with ease?
. Personally I don’t think it’s about users being not too bright, but more on developers/designers not thinking stuff through and the fact that most of us don’t have the whole god damn day booked just for filling-in a never ending form.
There are a few rules of creating super-friendly sign-up forms:
- Keep ‘em short. The idea is really simple: If you think your form is simple enough… cut it by half. Also if a field is to be
Optional
just skip it… Don’t bother. - Inline validation. Preferably every form should use inline validation/checking (unobtrusive of course).
- If you decide on using regular validation (reloading the page) I beg you, for Pete’s sake, remember the fields value – It’s not like I’m filling-in the form just for the heck of it.
- Provide meaningful feedback – clearly state which fields are not valid by highlighting them. Avoid the ruby-on-rails-way error reporting – printing what went wrong at the very top and letting the user figure out which fields actually does the text apply to.
- Provide label anchors at least for checkboxes. If you already say
tick the box to …
next to the checkbox, we might as well make the text toggle the box itself. - Don’t exaggerate with field descriptions as no one likes to be patronized. Titles should be self explanatory.
- Avoid using any Captcha systems at all times (especially reCaptcha). Make sure the site is safe without forcing the user to spend more time on your form – even with the cost of you spending more time removing stuff from the moderation queue.
Actually I could go on with the list but I found a perfect example of what to avoid when building a signup form.
Here are some of the best sign-up forms I have came across:
280slides.com
I like this one a lot, especially the idea with adding just one field when you want to register instead of signing-up!
Newspond.com
My absolute fav of the ten. Compiles everything good – simplicity, graceful feedback and beautiful design.
Disqus.com
Yet another simple and friendly form.
Vimeo.com
The most laid back sign-up form, ever.
One response so far. Care to add one yourself?
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coffincat June 23rd, 2008 at 12:42
Yeah, some of sign-up forms could become users’ nightmares. I especially hate those ones in which you have to retype everything (or even required fields only) after typing wrong captcha (what becomes much easier last days - you know what I mean - captchas like type-what-gender-are-kittenz-with-geminate-numbers-and-whatever-in the-picture-below)… And this - http://peoplehavepower.com/signup - deserves for the SIGN-UP FORM MONSTER title imo. trembles Have you ever abandoned joining some service because of the terrible form? I have ;-)
