Feb
1
2011
Episode 106: Optimizing Your Forms
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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
- ABTest.com – Screenshot examples of AB Tests
- Optimizely – Dead simple A/B testing
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
- Always Compare
- 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
- Mad libs form style leads to 40% increase for some
- 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
