Building a great website that encourages your users to buy your products, or to book or sign up to your services is the aim of most company or business websites. From the landing page, to the product pages and descriptions, the majority of your website is probably designed to show off your products or services, and to provide all the important information that your potential customers or clients may need. But when it comes to actually entering the information in your online form, your customers could be fighting a losing battle. Especially when accessing the information from a mobile website. So why are online forms so complicated? And can single screen forms provide the much needed solution? Well, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester, we are Manchester’s leading web design professionals. We work with a variety of companies across Manchester, and the North West, including those in Blackburn and Chorley, to provide high quality web design solutions. As a result, we have produced this guide to everything you should know about the advantages of single screen forms for mobile websites.
What are the problems with online forms?
When accessing online forms from a mobile device, there are often a number of design problems that can hinder consumers progress. And this often leads to shopping carts being abandoned. These problems can include:
- Form entry fields being too small to click on and edit- on a mobile device, the content of your screen can be reduced in size to fit the device. However, this can mean that certain important features, like links and buttons on online forms, are just too small to use properly.
- Form entry fields positioned too far to one side- another common issue is that the entry fields will be positioned too far to one side of the screen for the users to access. This is often related to any formatting you have in place for your form, that is not compatible with responsive design.
- Lack of error capture- once your users have fought their way through your form, providing error capture to identify any issues or entry errors help users identify where they have made a mistake. Without this, your users may be stranded in limbo,and think that your website has the problem instead.
What are the advantages of single screen forms for mobile websites?
One of the best solutions to the problem of online forms on mobile websites is to use just a single screen for each part of the form. This should include a progress bar at the top or bottom, to show how far through the form your users are, as they enter just one or two details per screen until complete. So what are the advantages of this design? Well, there are several including:
- Not overwhelming your users with entry boxes to complete- it can feel much less taxing to fill out just one or two boxes at a time rather than be faced with ten or more at once.
- The boxes will fit on the screen- there will not be any issue with boxes being too small to use or fill in
- Simple design- the simple design makes the whole purchasing or booking process feel more professional and less stressful
For more information or advice, or for high quality, professional web design solutions, get in touch with the experts today, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester.