Archive for June, 2008
How to Lay Out Form Input Fields
Your goal as a web publisher is maximize the number of (legitimate) respondents to your forms. A first step towards this goal is to lay out your forms in a way that is intuitive to users, makes forms faster to fill in, and minimizes form validation errors.
It follows four points you should consider when designing a web form:
- choose the most appropriate input field widget for the situation
- group fields together within logical sections
- place multi-line text input fields (textarea in HTML) towards the bottom of the form
- group optional fields together at the bottom of the form
The first point is discussed in details in FormSmarts documentation.
The second point commends, for example, that when you ask people about their contact details, you group all relevant fields (first name, last name, email,…) together. We found that most form designers tend to do that right. The form builder will in the future allow users to define different logical (and visual) sections within web forms.
Multi-line text input fields obviously tend to take longer to fill in than other input fields. They require more effort, thinking and typing, so place them after other fields. Visitors will be less inclined to abandon the form altogether if they have already spent time completing the first part of the form.
The last point is about grouping optional fields together at the bottom of the form. This allows people to quickly review the remaining questions, and skip the fields they don’t want to fill in or don’t apply to them. This may of course conflict with grouping fields within logical sections. In that case, place optional fields at the end of each logical section.
We’ve now enabled comments, and we warmly welcome your thoughts and feedback about this post. if you’re reading this by email, just click on the title to post a reply.
Posted on June 29th, 2008 in HTML form.
4 Comments »
Tags: form builder, form design, howto, input field, web forms
Ever Wished You Could Reorder Fields?
The set of form-making operations supported by FormSmarts form builder was up to now almost complete, allowing to:
- create a form
- delete a form
- edit form properties (name, title, return URL, form filling instructions, recipient email account)
- add a form input field
- delete a field
- edit field properties (name, description, field type, input widget, optional/required)
The last unsupported operation was to allow users to easily change the order in which fields appear on a form. This is often needed to:
- group fields logically
- group optional fields together at the bottom of a form
- insert a field in a existing form
- move fields around to increase the visual appeal of a form
Reordering fields manually is tedious, as it involves deleting and re-creating fields.
No more. Reordering fields is now a trivial drag & drop: in the fields tab, drag the field you want to move, and drop it in the position you want.
As usual, we welcome your comments and suggestions about this feature.
Posted on June 20th, 2008 in form builder.
1 Comment »
Tags: form builder, form design, input field
Text & Background Colors in Embedded Forms
As already mentioned in another post, we are soon going to allow FormSmarts users to customize the look of web forms. This applies in particular to embedded forms.
At this time, the form text color is black, and the form background is transparent. This leads to an issue when the page hosting the form has a black background. If you are affected by this problem, please contact us so we change the text color of your forms to white.
We welcome your suggestions about form look/style configuration options you would find useful, besides colors and border.
Posted on June 17th, 2008 in HTML form.
No Comments »
Tags: embed, web forms, widget
Managing Form Recipients
You can manage the email addresses registered on your FormSmarts account in the Settings tab, under Form Recipients.
Adding an Email Account
Before you can start using an email address as a form subscriber, you must first add it to your FormSmarts account, and verify it. We verify that the email account owner agrees to being added to a FormSmarts account by sending a verification link. Once the email address owner has visited the verification link, the status of that email address will change to Verified (Note: you will need to refresh the list of email accounts if you opened the verification link in a new window). You can use any verified email address as a form subscriber or as your FormSmarts login.
Changing the Recipients of a Form
When you create a new form, results are sent to your login email address by default. To have a form sent to other email accounts:
- Add the email addresses you need to your account as just described (Form Recipients option in the Settings tab).
- Edit the details of each form in the Forms tab, checking or un-checking each email subscriber as required.
A recipient must be verified before it can be used as a form recipient.
Changing Your Login Email
You can set any of the verified email addresses registered on your account as your FormSmarts login. There is one restriction: you can’t set an email address as you login if it’s already the login for another account.
A key icon is displayed next to your login email address.
Note: any email addresses that you use as login or form recipient has the Active status, and can’t be deleted.
Give Feedback!
We welcome your feedback about this feature. This will help us improve it in the future.
Posted on June 16th, 2008 in form builder.
15 Comments »
Tags: form builder, form recipient, form results
Changing a Form’s Recipient Email Address
We get many emails from users asking how they can modify the email address held on their FormSmarts account.
At this time, each FormSmarts account is bound to a single email address. The address is used both as the account username, and as the recipient of all the forms on the account.
We will soon be upgrading FormSmarts Form Builder to provide more flexible email address management.
Users will be able to:
- change the login email address
- specify a different recipient email address for each form
Learn more about upcoming features. We welcome your feedback and feature suggestions.
Posted on June 10th, 2008 in form builder.
No Comments »
Tags: email notification, form builder, form recipient, upcoming
