My mission in life is to create simple interfaces. Well, at least right now that’s what it is. (Last week it was finding my passport.) I’m sick and tired of blog comment forms that twist my arm and make me type my ridiculously long URL time and time again (http colon forward-slash forward-slash www dot eoghan mc cabe dot com forward-slash naive hyphen by hyphen design aggghhhhhhh!). I’m fed up with contact forms that refuse to send for anything less than a bloody ZIP code and a fax number (I have neither you pedantic piece of GUI!).
Good usability means easy to use. Same thing. An interface that is easy to use will be used more often and by more people and keep those people happier longer. Case in point; a client’s old contact form used to ask for Name, Mobile Number, House Number, Work Number, Address, Where did you hear about us?, What products are you interested in? and then after all that, asked you to type your message. This is not uncommon and I’ve seen forms like this all over the place. So I spent one hour making it look like this:
And to top it off I put that form at the end of every page. My aim was to make it as easy as possible for folks to get in touch. And here’s what happened:
| Month | Conversions | Visitors | Rate |
| April | 21 | 1369 | 1.53% |
| May | 31 | 1264 | 2.45% |
| June | 27 | 1484 | 1.82% |
| July | 31 | 1742 | 1.78% |
| August | 62 | 1072 | 5.78% |
| September | 91 | 1762 | 5.29% |
Conversions more than tripled after I put the changes live at the start of August. Imagine that, tripling your leads with one hour’s work! So, when putting my temporary business site online, I made the form as easy as I could:
And many more people have been getting in touch. But here’s the rub, I broke from convention and so my poor visitors have been confused. And it’s entirely my fault too. Today I got two enquiries, but… neither contained any contact details at all! Damn. There’s a lesson there folks; Albert Einstein said:
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.
5 Comments
I was thinking about this very topic last night after seeing your contact form.
I thought ‘how simple’! but as you say it crossed my mind that people will forget to include neccesary details.
A decent soloution would be to have a ‘thank you’ page that asks “Did you include contact details?” and then give the user an option of adding contact details to their message.
I am redesigning my site at the moment and it works in the way described above. My current “contact form”:http://davejeffery.com/contact/ is a mess, it asks for: Name, Company, Location, Phone, Mobile, Email, Subject & finally Enquiry.
Hi Dave,
I’ll have to implement something like that alright. Looking forward to your new site.
It would be interesting to find out the quality of the leads. Good, paying jobs with good clients or cheap feckers who grind you down with request after request and never actually buy anything.
I do love the simplicity of it. But i hope it does not make it too easy for the grinders as it does for the clients.
Hahaha. Never thought of it that way. Well, interestingly, a lot of my recent leads have been of the latter kind! Not that I’d ever call potential clients cheap. Or feckers.
But, if it makes it easy for the grinders, I presume it also makes it easy for the good guys. Rather have leads to pick the good clients out of than have no leads at all.
I have been using the simple contact form for few years now and I have experienced the jump in conversion since then :)
However, I would suggest that -
1. Include couple of contact fields as well like Name, Email, Project Details (Phone number is optional as many people may not like to disclose that)
2. Include a link to the privacy policy or at least make a person feel safe enough that his information will not be sold out!
3. Put this contact form in every page of your website.
Should do a lot of good!
Abhishek
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[…] January 16, 2007Simplify contact forms for better conversion Eoghan McCabe has covered some good conversion tips in his blog post - User Interface Simplicity Gone Wrong. […]