Episode 106: Optimizing Your Forms

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Up your conversion and optimize your forms!

News and Follow/Ups – 01:28

  • 30 Day Challenge update
  • Stand up station
  • Eye-Fi update

Geek Tools – 16:12

  • YakTrax – Cleats for snow and ice

Webapps – 18:36

Optimizing Your Forms – 24:18

  • Why Forms?
    • Forms are the reason you have a website.
    • Forms can be the most valuable pieces of your website.   If you are looking for one thing to optimize think forms
      • There are web apps that exist only to test the color/style of your form button
  • 4 Questions
    • What did they do?
    • How did they do it?
    • Why did they do it?
    • Could they do it?
  • Questions you could ask about forms
    • How many visitors saw the form correctly?
    • How many visitors started to fill out the form?
    • How far down did visitors get?
    • How long did visitors linger at each field?
    • How many visitors submitted the form?
    • How many visitors submitted the form but missed required fields?
  • Conversion
    • Importance of setting goals
    • How to measure conversion?
    • Segmentation
  • Analyze Data Properly
    • Always Compare
      • You should always talk about data with words that end in ‘er’: better., faster, stickier, heavier, weaker, later
      • Compare
    • Segment Everything
    • Don’t Settle for Averages
  • General Tips
    • Never ask the user anything that you already know
    • Never ask the user something you don’t need to make the conversion
      • Posterous will let you sign up by simply emailing them, no sign up form necessary
    • Think outside the box
    • Don’t make people login to buy/convert
    • Use Captchas as an absolute last resort
    • Make Buttons bigger bolder and a different color
    • Do 5 usability tests on your friends or on the internet
    • Take screenshots of the form changes you make to document what you have tried in the past
    • Every site is different, what works for amazon may not work for your customers, but often times it is a good place to start looking for ideas
  • Great books on monitoring and form optimization

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 1st, 2011 at 3:00 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Episode 106: Optimizing Your Forms”

  • Tyghe Says:
    February 8th, 2011 at 9:23 pm

    I don’t remember if I had Yaktrax or some similar brand, but they are life savers. Especially at MSU where the sidewalks are really slippery sometimes.

    Remember, often it isn’t hitting the ground from slipping, but they way you react to slipping that ends up injuring you.

  • Tyghe Says:
    February 8th, 2011 at 9:24 pm

    Do you guys notice decreased battery life from your EyeFi? It seems to drain my battery really quickly.

  • Jade Robbins Says:
    February 8th, 2011 at 11:09 pm

    Tyghe, you are totally right. It drains the CRAP out of my battery. The one exception is my new Sanyo Xacti camera that is Eye-Fi aware. I think it only gives power to the Eye-Fi when there is a picture to take, thus helping the battery life.

  • Tyghe Says:
    February 8th, 2011 at 11:23 pm

    I was actually really put off by the fact that my EyeFi drained my battery so fast. I know you have to give a little to get the cool feature, but I think it sucks way too much power. I actually only used my EyeFi for about a day and it has been sitting lonely by itself for quite some time now. Good thing I got that thing for free with my drobo.

    Maybe they are banking on devices being more aware of the card like your Xacti though?

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