Long Pages and Short Forms
January 2nd, 2007
In response to last week’s post on how long pages rule, Heidi Adkisson wrote a great post about how she’s seen users have trouble with long forms:
The problem I’ve seen in testing with very long forms (particularly when people need to enter information carefully, as with financial data) is that they are difficult for people to check over before submitting. Errors can be hard to find because it requires scrolling up and down the page to locate them. And, if something technically goes wrong, people potentially have a huge amount of re-entry to do.
We have found that users perform a long data entry task more quickly and with fewer errors when it’s broken into shorter steps rather than presented as a long, scrolling page. And with Ajax, you can design the flow so that it occurs smoothly within a single page (rather than requiring a “jumpy” page load for each step).
Yes. Yes. Agree completely.
