Choose the right words to use on your forms

A web form is a text-driven interface. The core of the interaction is the questions asked and answers given. This is why the words we use in the form—and not how it looks—are the most important part of the design.

In Chapter 3 of Designing UX: Forms, Jessica Enders provides a comprehensive toolkit of tips for your form’s words. You'll learn about Tourangeau’s four-step model for question answering (comprehension, retrieval, judgement, answering), which can help provide a useful checklist for the ease of use of your form. You'll discover best practice on areas like labels, headings, error messaging, length of questions, open versus closed questions, satisficing, and much more. You'll see how you can make simple changes that can dramatically increase the UX of your forms.

For example, you will see how you can take a difficult to comprehend form question like this:

Screenshot of badly worded form question.

And simply split it up, which improves comprehension greatly:

The same question split into two radio boxes

This lengthy chapter is packed with examples and case studies, and is a very comprehensive examination of how to make your forms better by using the right words.

Designing UX: Forms

Discover the principles behind building great forms. Design for multiple devices, gather the right information, create balanced layouts, design effective user flow and much more to increase conversion and take the guesswork out of the design process.

Create better forms today!

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Until next time,
James at SitePoint