Forms that Work

6 Making the Form Flow Easily

Making the form flow easily

Break up long forms by topic

Crush the fields onto as few pages as possible (sometimes)

Split across multiple pages by dividing the form into topics (better)

Keep to one topic at a time

Ask anticipated questions before surprising ones

Ask less intrusive questions before more intrusive

If questions come up more than once, explain the difference between them

Use progress indicators

Summary menus work better than progress indicators for some forms

Don’t surprise users with sudden changes

Avoid pages that change without warning

It’s OK to change pages on user command

It’s OK to build a custom form based on earlier input

Avoid tabs as a way of getting around a form

Be gentle with errors

Validation ...