What are Best Practices for UX Form Design?

Questions about UX form design? You’re in the right place. Gain some valuable Ironistic insight — plus examples — for great UX form design.

Give your users a good reason for filling out the form — and it make it easy to do so.

Some UX best practices when you’re designing your form include:

Keep your fields aligned in one column — it’s easier to read.
Arrange your fields from easiest to hardest: If a user starts with their name and email, they’ve already begun the form, and once they’re committed, they’ll finish the form.
Place your labels on top of rather than next to the fields — it increases the number of forms completed.
Group related fields together or break your form up into multiple steps: Multiple steps will almost always increase completion.
Remove fields that are not essential: Expedia found that they lost $12 million a year by asking one additional question.
Give your users a reason to fill out a form: Labeling a form “Get Sales Tips in Your Inbox” vs. “Sign Up” has a greater chance of users actually filling out the form.
Example: Zendesk does a good job as they’ve broken their registration form into multiple steps. Each step only has two questions and they saved the personal information for the last step — by then the user has already gone through several steps and will likely finish the form.

Keep it short and simple. Example: Mail Chimps sign-up process is super clean and easy to use, plus the little monkey is there to encourage you.
Try to avoid multi-columns. Use one-column form layouts.
Use a clear title.
Forms can be boring to fill out — make them fun, use some funny text or graphics!
Have auto-fill browsers.
Design mobile forms differently.
Add in progress bars for longer forms.
Specify errors inline – show them where the error went wrong, highlight the block in red.
Use descriptive CTAs – Instead of “Submit,” use “Sign Up”.

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