Forms R us

Forms, forms, forms.

sometimes it feels like all you do is create yet another form. As I like to make rods for my own back (after all what else are backs for?), these forms have to be standards compliant, accessible, usable semantic forms. One of these days I must remember to get rid of all theses morals and good intentions, they really are a bind.

Why do forms matter?

Forms are hyper-critical to the success of your web site. As nice as beautiful interfaces and great copy is, they are simply carrots to temp visitors toward your form. Your whole site, in fact your whole internet presence is a conduit which should flow your visitors seamlessly toward your form.

Now that’s not to say the other elements are not important, they are, and how they achieve there goal will influence the mindset of the visitor appearing at your form. But, all that other effort will be wasted if they arrive at a difficult, intrusive form. Nowhere demonstrates this better than the area of e-commerce which rely on a form to complete the transaction process. Statistics from the on-line advertiser DoubleClick show that forms that are started but not completed (known in e-commerce as abandoned carts) rose year on year by 24% in 2004 up to 57% of all transaction attempts. According to DoubleClicks estimates at that time for every dolllar spent on-line, a further $4.51 was left in an abandoned cart.

Now some times that will be due to ‘tyre-kicking’, but you can bet a fair number of those are due to shopping cart frustration . Although these are e-commerce references, they simply allow us to easily quantify the importance of forms. Yet web designers and developers still get these vital elements wrong, Jakob Nielsen rated them as the fifth most prevalent web design mistake as recently as 2005, and don’t forget forms have been around for as long as the web, so we should have got it right by now.

So what are we doing about it?

Currently we’re re-tweaking the form plugin to make the forms created more usable and safe. This has involved creating a new captcha device, which asks a human answerable question rather than a visual read-the obscure-numbers thing. The visual captcha devices were fine to start with, but now as the spam bots get better at reading them, the letters have to become more obscured. Now they are reaching the point were half the time I can’t make out the letters, plus if you’re visually impaired they are impossible unless they provide an audio alternative, but if you’re at work and don’t have speakers, you can’t access that, etc , etc. I think they have just about had their day.

Instead we ask a simple question:
“What is six plus two”
and give a drop down of possible answers; one, two, three, etc. With non-obvious values to be passed back to the server. This simply gives a task which is easy for a human to do but hard for a computer, so fulfilling the purpose of a captcha.

Will this be the end of spam?

No. Absolutely not. But it gives us a fighting chance to save our in-boxes from the deluge of trivia  and dodgy offers we currently deal with. Sooner or later, if this method becomes popular, the spam bots will work out how to overcome it, and at that point we will need to come up with something else. But for now it’s the best compromise available.