Alex Williams

Boy do I ever hate forms.

<rant>

• I hate having to fill 20 form fields to request a “demo” or “preview”.
• I hate when 9 out of 10 form fields are mandatory.
• I hate when form fields are too short.
• I hate when form fields are too long.
• I hate pressing tab and skipping the drop-down.
• I hate providing private information without knowing the context in which it will be used (marketing, research, spam, cold calls).
• I hate clicking on “submit” and waiting 5 seconds for the page to reload, only to be told my username already exists or I forgot to enter my annual income.

</rant>

I hate form fields.

Can we all please work harder to make form fields more useful and relevant?

The problem is that we have become so accustomed to those “generic” fields that we decide to use them in EVERY application even though they don’t actually need them.

It’s 2007. We need to start thinking more humanly and less logically about how we want people to fill our forms. At the moment, my application only asks 3 questions:

1. What’s your Full Name?
2. What’s your email address?
3. What’s your password? (oh and please confirm it).

If I need to add more, I will make sure they are absolutely vital to the use of the application.

Here’s what really bugs me:

• Firstname, Lastname: is that really necessary? Why not just use Full Name? Oh because you plan to email me with “Dear Mr. Williams” ? What if I was a woman? Oh right, you have a “Title” field too… “Mr, Mrs., Dr.”…
• Phone number: have you EVER received a phone call from a website after entering your phone number in a field? No? then why do they need it?
• Address: once again, have you EVER received mail from a website after entering your address?
• Country, City, State/Province/Territory: do I really need to scroll through 193 countries to select mine? Or 50 states + 10 provinces? Republics, Unions? Colonies ;) What about Canada’s newest territory? Nunavut? How many forms added that to their list? Couldn’t you just call it “Location”, and let me fill it the way I see fit (i.e: Montreal, Quebec, Canada)?
• Number of users: What’s a user? Ohhh you mean employees? Or managers? Or customers? Between 0-100, 100-200? What if it’s 100? Which do I select? Can’t I just enter it myself?
• Job Title: Does “President of mailing things” count?

Some websites absolutely require certain fields to be filled properly (i.e: zipcode) because that is vital to the functionality of the site (i.e: a site that generates a map of where people are located in the USA). In that case, it makes sense to request that information.

How did you solve this problem? Do you think it’s a problem? I’m curious to know what others have done. What is important and what’s not important? Can you re-define the word “important” for your specific application? It’s something to think about.