Avoid ruining your CX with poor form design - an invaluable resource

You can spend all the money in the world on a fabulous design for your multi-platform, multi-channel customer experience but if you skimp on the order form then you could be throwing good money, and good customers, down the drain.
There are some very basic rules for designing good forms, that will help your customers order products or services easily, without pain and frustration. These are my top ten tips:

1. Chunk the content into logical groups. There is nothing more off-putting than a massive long list of questions with no order or categorisation.
2. Save information. Allow customers to confidently navigate between pages, saving information that they have spent time entering. For longer more complex forms allow customers to save and retrieve their forms at a later time.
   
3. Strip your form down to the bare basics. Only ask questions that are relevant to your customer. Avoid legacy questions that keep databases happy but frighten off customers.
4. Facilitate form filling with good visual design. Carefully consider all the visual elements of alignment, grouping, icons, visual clutter, button placement etc
5. Consider the interaction style for both expert and novice users. There are those who will be highly keyboard driven, using tab and enter to complete a form and there will be those who will not let go of their mouse. Design for both.
   
6. Keep supplementary text to an absolute minimum. Ask yourself if your customer can complete the form without those three paragraphs of text at the start of the page and then be ruthless and cut it out.
7. Develop a meaningful help system. Consider the three level of help: 1) inline contextual help (related to and in close proximity to a specific field); 2) section/page instructions (giving general instructions at the top of a page or section); 3) customer initiated form help (a more comprehensive guide to filling out the entire form which the customer can access if and when they need more information.)
   
8. Write meaningful error and success messages that allow users to recover gracefully and know what they need to do next
9. Provide clear sign-posts for the next action. This includes providing a progress bar, progress instructions and clearly distinguishing between the primary action button e.g. Submit or Next and the secondary actions such as Back or Cancel
10. Test and reiterate your designs with customers - you never get it right first time no matter how many times you've designed a form
    

This list is by no means exhaustive. For more extensive research check out the excellent resource: 'Web Form Design - Filling in the Blanks' by Luke Wroblewski http://tinyurl.com/656qpc

Can there be too much customer in customer experience?

Most of my career has been spent trying to convince organisations that they need to listen to their customers in order to improve their business. Interestingly I have found recently that I have needed to remind organisations that they need to balance the needs of their customers with their business. Something I thought I would never hear myself say!
One of the first rules that I learnt about design - is don't do it in a vacuum. That is you need to find inspiration and stimulus for design away from your desk. You also need to talk to other people, especially the people that will be affected by your design.
Primarily you need to consider the people who will use your design; so ideally you'll want to consult with them to understand how they might use it and what their pain-points are around what they use today in order that you can improve the experience of using the design. However for some user-centred practitioners this is where they stop; they fail to involve any other interested parties.
This can pose a real danger when the designs are then presented to the business and the business says 'OK, well that might be all well and good for the customer but it's going to cost $1m+ and as there is little value/return on investment for the business then we're not doing it.'
Or equally when the designs are 'thrown over the fence' to the development team who then place the pretty document on a shelf for prosperity because they can't implement the design.
I certainly don't want to be constrained by technology or business factors when I am trying to innovate, but I do believe that there should be a balance between 'desirability' (customer requirements), 'viability' business requirements and 'feasibility' (technical requirements).
In my experience the best results come as a result of timely collaboration between the three.