Forms are something that should be on every campaign website no matter how big or small the campaign is. These forms might be to collect contact information, request volunteers, or sign up for events. In any case, the first question always asked when drafting a form is “What information do we need to collect?”

The first reaction to that question is always something like “We need x, and y, and z would be nice…oh, and we can’t forget etc, etc” From a campaign stand point, the more information is the better. The more information you have the better you can mine the data for information about your supporters and the more ways you will have to contact your constituents. Before you go creating a hundred form fields…stop. Think about the form from a user perspective. As a user, do you want to answer a hundred questions? Do you want to have to go through pages and pages of text boxes without knowing when it ends? Most likely the answer is going to be “No.” Your die hard fans may spend the time, but they are going to turn up to vote for you on election day no matter what. The simpler your form is, the more likely visitors will actually fill out the form.

A second issue is with trust. In other words, what information does the visitor trust giving over to your website. There are multiple concerns here such as who sees the data? Where is the data stored? How is the data used? And, is the data secure? You will never be able to answer these questions in a way that will satisfy your visitors. The best solution is to only ask for information that people do not mind having floating around in a server.

One thing I notice a lot of forms do not have is form validation. This is to validate the information itself. For example, an email should have an “@” symbol followed by some sort of domain such as “gmail.com”. If you caught a possible typo in the email, how are you going to get it corrected…by emailing them? Also, you should give them an error message telling them specifically what field is broken. If they put letters in the phone field, say “Invalid characters for phone. Please only enter numbers.” It will also deter bots and people who want to fill your form out with junk. It is worth while to collect only the good data.

Finally, consider layout. I could go on and on about layout, but all I am going to say make it easy to navigate and fill out. Your form should be all on one page and form fields should be obvious. Layout also includes the means of navigating to the form. It should be very obvious how to get to the form and what it is. For example, if I want to volunteer, I do not want to spend a bunch of time searching for that form.

Everyone does forms slightly different. The important thing is to make it usable. There is a balance between simplicity and getting the information you want. You don’t want to ask a million questions, but one question is probably not helpful. A good example of a simple and usable form is Kasich’s Sign Up form. It is short and easy to understand. Better yet, he has a short little video at the top that you can play. Bonus: videos are more engaging and easier to watch than reading a bunch of text.

The next post will be July 5th.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Kasich, forms, usability, website. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.