Feb 1 2011

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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