From Dreadful to Delightful: Making Forms that Work

When was the last time you filled out a website form that was easy and delightful? Forms are an essential part of how students, faculty, and alumni interact with your department—from signing up for your newsletter, registering for an event, or requesting support. But unfortunately, online forms in higher education are often cumbersome and counterintuitive. In this session, we’ll look at examples of great form design and break down the basic principles that will keep your users smiling as they hit “submit.” You’ll learn guidelines for how to create and organize questions that make sense, as well as how to write field labels, help text, and confirmation messages that reassure the user at each step in the process. We'll cover best practices that apply to any platform, whether you're a Drupal developer, hand-coding forms in HTML, or using third-party tools like Qualtrics, Google Forms, or Wufoo.