Are there any recommended best practices regarding the length of a form? I mean, the vertical scroll length.
I’m developing a form similar to an old form on our website. The old form scrolls down, about the length of 2 pages. Very roughly I’d say 1500-1600px long. The old form is a center-aligned table with massive whitespace on either side of all the inputs and checkboxes.
Well I put it all together nice and neat, probably down to about 1000px long. I just moved one section of 9 checkbox options, floated it right, and put the submit button underneath on that right side. The left side is just name/email/address type stuff (10 input fields). Total width of the page content is 895px, so with my form there’s still lots of whitespace between the two sides and I felt like it was more user friendly this way.
Unfortunately the marketing manager told me she thinks it’s better the way it was, telling me to make it “like the original form so it is less overwhelming with so much to complete”.
I want to argue my point a little bit because I guess I have been under the impression that a very long scrolling form is not user-friendly and should be avoided. I can’t recall where I might have heard it or if any studies have been done. What do you all think?
The first thing to check - do you really need to ask all those questions? Far too many websites ask questions that they don’t need to ask - and that just gets users’ backs up.
Second - moving some form elements to one side may make it shorter, but might it mean that some people will miss some parts of it? (Bear in mind that even if you don’t think it’s possible for anyone to get it wrong, the chances are the plenty of them will!)
Hi Stevie, thanks for the input. Well I don’t think we have that many questions. We’re just getting inquiries about the organization I work for, and we ask for name, email, address, and phone. (Only name/email required.) Checkboxes on the right side are a list of topics the inquirer is interested in. That’s it - no more inputs or questions.
Within 900px I had one half devoted to name/email/address inputs, and the other half the topics checkboxes. Plenty of whitespace in between, and each element is very clear. The old form is a center-aligned table with every input running down in the middle of the page so you end up scrolling to get to more fields. My new form has all the elements covered within the page content so no extra scrolling is required.
Well I realize it’s hard to argue my case here without being able to show the actual examples, but I’m working on a dev server.
I think my marketing manager is mostly interested in making sure it’s clear who is the boss. I’ve decided this example isn’t worth fighting over, although it’s pretty obvious to me which form is more user-friendly.
Generally, however, a form should be linear. If I encounter a form with questions scattered all over the place, I’ll usually find somewhere else to go, unless I really have to use that particular service.