Contact forms can fail in many ways. Be sure they do not by following these guidelines.

There are some simple steps you can take to create the best bridge possible between you and your clients. The most obvious way to receive that feedback is through a contact form. It is an essential component for owners of websites. It creates a channel to hear feedback, suggestions, and even sell services.

The Basics

There are several things that a basic contact form should include. Meeting these standards will ensure you are on the right path for creating an excellent contact form.

What to include

Studio 7 Designs‘ contact form is clear and to the point

For the most basic contact form, you will need to include several key components. These almost always include the senders name, a way to get in touch with them, and a message. Also be sure to include a clear submit or send button. Failing to meet these basic needs will insure in a quick failure.

Make sure not to get too lengthy in what you are asking for. Remember that the user is simply contacting you not asking for a quote on their next large project they want to hire you for. If they are requesting a quote it is best to allow contact in two forms, one for simply contacting you and one for quotes. If too much is required a user will abandon ship.

How to structure it

When structuring your contact page it is best to place your fields in a traditional location that leads from who is sending to what they are saying. This can easily be done in two ways. One is to offer a single row of fields to fill out. The other is to create a two column contact page by presenting a few fields on the left (possibly including name and email) and then presenting the message field on the right. Both of these structures are intuitive and easily understood.

Breaking these conventions (Redd has discussed conventions in the past) can often lead to confusion or a failed attempt to contact you. It is also of utmost importance to offer a tab through order that is conducive to your contact form. For example, do not set your form up so that if you tab from one field to what you expect to be the next that it goes to the header of the page.

Clearleft utilizes a two column contact form that is beautiful in every sense.

Submission is Key

Submitting the message in the contact form is yet another seemingly simple part that many people overlook. There are two key components that must be considered when asking the user to send a message to you through a contact form:

The call to action button

Looking back to David Hamill’s discussion on Good Call to Action buttons we can learn much about what we must consider when choosing our “send” button. When choosing what word to use, we must always consider our audience. The two most common choices are ’send’ and ’submit.’ Both of which convey their message clearly. Another option to consider is describing your action more clearly. This could be worded as ‘Send Email.’

Submitted. Now what?

Once an email is submitted, a user expects for a sign showing them that their intended action was successful. If the message sends and no confirmation is offered, then a user may have doubts of whether or not their message will be received. We always want to leave the users feeling confident about their actions.

At UX Booth we show our users a message highlighted in green that reads ‘Thank you – your message has been sent.’ You may also consider including a more detailed message. If you know that you don’t ever answer emails over the weekends that may be something you would like to include, or tell the user that you will work hard to respond within 48 hours.

UX Booth offers a confirmation message to inform users their message has been sent.

Going the Extra Mile

So that covers the basics. That is how you can make an effective contact form, however, maybe you want to go a bit further. I believe the following tips should be done to create the optimal experience.

Fail Gracefully

If a user encounters an error on your contact form, it creates a barrier between yourself and feedback or even a sale. When a user encounters an error be sure to offer useful feedback. An example of what to avoid could be “Error 4055″. What does that mean? How is that going to help the user correct his or her problem?

Offer helpful hints along the form to help guide users while they are attempting to get contact in contact with you. One of the easiest ways to accomplish this is through jquery. Be sure to visit Web Resource Depot’s ‘16 Free Ajax Contact Forms‘ for some excellent examples.

One particularly interesting jquery option is one that is truly geared towards Usability. Comments are often presented to a user in the respective fields, but when the user clicks it, the text disappears and becomes lost. Now there is a way to keep the tip in the field when clicked. Be sure to check it out and consider it on your next design: In-Field Labels: A Better Way + jquery Plugin.

Offer an Alternative to the Form

FireHost offers many forms of contact along side their contact form.

One of the best ways to avoid a total loss of communication is to also offer an alternative to the contact form.

Depending on your audience you may notice you receive fewer emails and more phone calls if the chance is offered. This is a common difference in generational use of the internet. David Hamill (yet again) saves the day by writing about the basics of <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://www.goodUsability.co.uk/2009/06/providing-contact-details/”>providing contact details. In this article he discusses many different ways to include information that should not be left out.

Conclusion

Your contact page is often the only way for clients, readers, and users to reach you. Make it as easy and pleasurable as possible for them. In many circumstances it can be the make or break point in terms of a sale or networking opportunity. By incorporating a few of these simple guidelines, you can increase the chance of that user getting through to you.

What contact form blunders do you hate? How have you made your contact form easier to use?

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I remember meeting Samsung executives year after year at the annual dinner given by the IDSA and Business Week. Each time it was a table of middle-aged males in suits. Then about a dozen years ago, we had dinner and it was different. With the suits were two young, flamboyant guys in colored shirts and ties who knew the language of design. Something was happening at Samsung.

Later, IDEO opened up it’s IDEO U, mainly for Samsung, as I recall. Dozens and dozens of Samsung managers and designers spent months in IDEO’s offices in California learning, absorbing, engaging in the culture of design. A bit later, I put Samsung on the cover of Business Week’s Asia edition when it won big in the IDEA awards for the first time ever.

It’s hard to believe today but in the early 90s there was a lot of talk about how hard it would be for Confucian-based cultures to be creative. The argument was that these cultures (Korea, China, Taiwan), were conservative, hierarchical, with long traditions of copying older artists.

Well, yes, in schools throughout Asia, there remains a strong element of that culture. But Samsung shows that history is not always a guide to the future, that people can break out from their cultural straight-jackets and that in the competitive world of business, old ways of doing things can be sacrificed for the new when the new can show it creates value.

Samsung’s success should be copied–and there is no better country to start copying than the US. American business culture has resisted innovation and creativity for far too long in the chase for short-term profits.

And check out the interactive gallery of all 151 winners.

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This is good news for the innovation and design industry, good news for consumers and good news for the global economy as a whole. We’ve been in lock-down mode for nearly a year, just trying to get by. With the crisis in the financial system in abeyance for the moment, stock prices rising strongly, housing showing signs of life in the US and the UK and China and India pulling the global economy ahead, animal spirits are rising in the managerial class once again.

Of course, this is the same managerial class that got us in this pickle. Strangely, most of the CEOs of most banks and most corporations are still where they were two years ago–in the corner office. To deal with the New Normal of this recovery–and this recovery will be very different from others–we need fresh leadership and insight.

One of the big differences in this recovery is that the US consumer won’t lead it. The US consumer is being replaced by the Chinese consumer as the economic driver of first resort. At least that’s the hope and theory.

Which brings us back to innovation. There was a huge embrace of innovation by US CEOs from the mid-90s to the period before the Great Recession but much of that has turned out to be superficial. The same two dozen corporations make up virtually every list of innovative and design-centric companies. Most corporations have launched innovation intitiatives, only to silo them off and contain them. Most CEOs have championed innovation programs only to leave it to others to lead them. Most managers talk about innovation and actually mean technology. They don’t understand the critical cultural and social science components of it.

If the US is to stop its slide in the global economy by reseting its manufacturing base and advancing its service sector, CEOs will have to deal seriously with innovation. This generation of chief executives, with a number of important exceptions, has not. They should be replaced.

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1. Understand the problem before solving it (and avoid “design on the spot”)
2. Sketch before making it pretty (and discuss abstractions versus specifics — “selection” vs. “combo-box”)
3. Validate designs before investing in (production) code
4. Well designed key features & workflows over quantity
5. Ease of use over ease of coding
6. Validated designs over expert opinion
7. Don’t make things “consistently” wrong
8. Don’t let users shoot themselves in the foot
9. Context is important (Where am I? How did I get here? Where can I go next? What is my current state?)
10. Whitespace is good (… the more you add, the more you detract from what is there. … every element added to a page detracts from the rest. (Paul Boag)

This is a living list – I expect to tweak it over time, adding, deleting, editing…

Related posts:

1. Design Guiding Principles
2. 6 Metrics for Managing UI Design

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1. Understand the problem before solving it (and avoid “design on the spot”)

2. Sketch before making it pretty (and discuss abstractions versus specifics — “selection” vs. “combo-box”)

3. Validate designs before investing in (production) code

4. Well designed key features & workflows over quantity

5. Ease of use over ease of coding

6. Validated designs over expert opinion

7. Don’t make things “consistently” wrong

8. Don’t let users shoot themselves in the foot

9. Context is important (Where am I? How did I get here? Where can I go next? What is my current state?)

10. White space is good “… the more you add, the more you detract from what is there … every element added to a page detracts from the rest.” (Paul Boag)

This is a living list – I expect to tweak it over time, adding, deleting, editing…
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Is sign-up part of your design? How do you engage users long enough to motivate them to take that precarious step of giving you information? What methods do you use to assure them that signing up on your site will provide them true value? And is that enough?

Next week, we’ll explore the issues of sign-up and user motivation with Joshua Porter. In the December 11 UIE Virtual seminar, Designing for Sign-up, Josh will describe the steps you can use to create the motivation for them to care about your product, using techniques employed by successful sites, such as Netflix, TripIt, and BlinkSale.

You’ll want to attend this critically important seminar if your team struggles with enticing your users to take the next step in long-term engagement, whether it’s subscribing , purchasing , or joining your offering. If your organization needs to implement a strategy that overcomes the customer’s natural resistance and engages them with your products and services, you won’t want to miss this presentation.

If you’re interested in attending, you’ll want to register soon, it’s filling up fast. As an added incentive to attend, use the Promotion Code MYARCHIVE to receive free lifetime access to the recorded event. You or anyone in your organization can watch it whenever you want, as often as you want!

Register today at http://www.uie.com/events/virtual_seminars/Designing_Sign_Up_Seminar/

In advance of the presentation, we’d love to hear from you. What tips and tricks can you share to make sign-up a successful aspect of others’ sites? What challenges has your team faced and what did you do to overcome them? We’d love to hear from you.

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UIE is excited to announce our new UIE Roadshow: Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences, a full-day workshop, based on 10 years of UIE’s extensive research, that will deliver new insights and inspire your team to create the best User Experiences. 

This winter, we’re taking this workshop on the road to:

• Portland, OR on Tuesday, February 17, 2009 
• Minneapolis, MN on Thursday, February 19, 2009 
• Atlanta, GA on Monday, March 2, 2009

Recognized industry leader, Jared Spool, will share information that previously we’ve only made available to our biggest clients. 

During the day, Jared will lead you through these sessions:

9:00 am: Designing for the Age of Experience

Jared will open the day with an overview of UIE’s research into great experience design. He’ll reveal the factors that are found in the organizations that are successful at delivering great experiences. And, he’ll show you the important criteria that you can use to measure your team’s effectiveness.


10:45 am: UX Level-Up: Taking Your Team to the Next Level
You’ll assess the critical dimensions that will pinpoint what your team needs to succeed. Jared will share how UIE measures organizations, which factors are most critical, and how to tell exactly where your group falls. From there, you’ll put together a solid action plan, describing the exact steps you need to take, to go to the next level and beyond.


1:00 pm: The Making of a UX Vision

You’ll discover the secrets behind creating a unified User Experience vision that you can share with your entire organization. (Hint: it’s not nearly as hard as it sounds.) Jared will show you how, once you’ve created your vision, your team can use it to guide and focus your entire organization on a path that will yield delighted users while exceeding business objectives.

3:15 pm: Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusions to Simplify Design

In a perfect session to end the day, Jared will use professional magic effects to demonstrate the parallels between the world of magical illusions and the world of digital design. He’ll reveal the secrets from several magical illusions, and then show you how to use the same mechanisms to create delightful experiences for your users.

Read the detailed program description.

Knowing that times are tough for folks, we’ve made a special effort to make the UIE Roadshow a very affordable event. We think it’s important to get our latest research out, so we’ve priced this full-day workshop for far less than other programs. Additionally, we’re offering a $75 discount when you register with the promotion code SHOW09. 

Do you have a team to send? We’re offering steep discounts. Bring your team and the price goes as low as $299 for each person.

This is guaranteed to be an eventful workshop, with a ton of detailed examples, hands-on exercises, Jared’s usual funny material, and, for the first time, live magic tricks! 

We hope to see you there.

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So, it’s a nice fifteen minutes of fame when we get picked up by the popular press, in this case, Fast Company magazine:

Cliff Kuang did a nice job describing the research I described in my $300 Million Button article from a few weeks ago:

UIE studied people actually using the site, and it turns out that the prospect of registering was enough to turn some users away; meanwhile, even return users had problems logging in because they didn’t remember the email address or password they signed up with. (45% of users apparently had multiple registrations—a few had up to 10.) Granted, these represented a small portion of users. But for a retailer with $25 billion, even small portions signify huge lost profits.

So UIE redesigned the site, replacing the “register” button with “continue.” They also added a message, saying that registering wasn’t required to checkout, but was optional and might be helpful if you returned.

Sales went up 45%—$15 million in the first month, and $300 million in the first year.

Read Cliff’s write up on FastCompany.com.

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At Juice, we were very excited about the public release of the Google Analytics Data Export API. Our product Concentrate has been running on a hackish home-brew Google Analytics export tool since its release last November, and we were happy to be able to relaunch as a Customer Example of the Google Analytics Data Export API.

Today, we are releasing a new, free tool called Vasco de GAPI. Vasco is a web-based tool for exploring the API, for downloading complex slices of data using the API, and to even automatically generate code that will allow coders easy replication of the API calls in question. Instead of describing it in more detail, I am just going to demo it.

I am going to start with a relatively rare but curious functionality of Google Analytics. I keep track of who wrote each blog using a Google Analytics user-defined setting that is set to the author’s name for each specific blog post. Slicing our blog by author can be cool for me as an employee so that I can brag during my yearly review about how many visitors I bring in or what natural search visits we get for free as a result of my posting. For the demo, I’m going to discover the natural keywords that bring traffic to my blogposts on the website.

Let’s get started.

The first step is to authenticate using Google’s OAuth system.

I select ga:keyword as a dimension.

ga:pageviews is the metric I am interested in. The results will automatically get sorted by the first metric, so I do not need to explicitly specify a sort value.

I set ga:userDefinedValue as a filter, and filter it to saluryasev, and select this last week as a reference point.

Here is the list of parameters that Vasco de GAPI is passing to google.

What are my results?

It turns out that of all my posts, the Google Trends API that I put out about a year ago drives the most natural traffic to our site. Hopefully, this will change with a few more blog posts, but this is still rather interesting data. I could target that specific audience with something Google-trendy. On an unrelated note, a slap to my face was that Zach’s name sent fifteen users to my blogposts. Go figure. Sixteen users searched on my last name, and were probably looking for my more popular father.

To get at the rest of the data, I can click the download link at the bottom of the page or, for developers, another link downloads working code that will replicate this exact pull.

Vasco runs using an open source Python gdata wrapper for the API that can be downloaded here. This wrapper is powerful, and I will write another blogpost about it next week. It is plugged into the Google gdata module, and as such allows all forms of authentication available to gdata users, including OAuth, AuthSub, and clientside.

Hopefully, Vasco de GAPI can help all other potential explorers sail smoothly through the API. When it comes to data, Google is just an great company. They have had powerful APIs for most of their major services for years, and while the Analytics API is a latecomer, it actually is more powerful than the analytics interface itself. This sort of openness is something to be envied by all other analytics and web companies in the market.

By the way, please let me know if the explorer theme works well. It was a lot of fun working on a project with a slightly esoteric approach.

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