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A Guide to Implementing Form Validation Techniques

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Demonstrate the Benefits of Completing the Form

In the section below we discuss how you should decide which fields should be mandatory but it is worth thinking about how your users got to your form. Some users might have clicked to reach the form without having completely decided whether they intend to fill in the form, whilst others might have clicked the link to the form out of curiosity. Given this, it is always essential to re-communicate the specific benefits to the user of completing the form. For example, on the North Square Demonstration Request page, a poor description of the benefits would be:

"Complete this form to receive a demonstration of our services."

Instead, we describe the benefits in the following way:

"Reports or telephone demonstrations offering practical advice that you can use to improve your website."

Note: this advice is less relevant to transaction forms because it should be obvious through other techniques, like page design, that the purpose of the form is to complete a transaction.

Decide Which Fields Should be Mandatory

One of the main tasks in creating or evaluating forms is deciding which of the following categories your fields fall into:

• Essential: Fields that are used by your organisation for every user. These fields are needed before a professional and valuable response can be made or to complete a transaction. Typical fields are name, company, email address and product or service of interest. These fields are normally mandatory.
• Useful: Fields that will improve the initial response to the user, but are not required to make a valuable response. Organisations should decide which questions they would like upfront and which can be asked later on in communication with the user. Useful fields are those that can be acted upon in some way before responding to the user for the first time. These fields are normally non-mandatory.
• Useless: Many companies collect information even though it does not get used at any stage of communication with the user. Ensure these fields are removed.

Identifying Mandatory Fields

We recommend that all forms identify mandatory fields by:

• Writing a sentence above the form along the lines of: "All mandatory fields in the form below are identified with a red star (*)."
• The red star should be added immediately after each field label.

The size of the star should be large - do not be tempted to make it small for aesthetic reasons. The advantage of using a star is that it will be read out by screen readers and it follows a long established website convention (thus will improve your form's usability).

<< Page 1: A Guide to Implementing Form Validation Techniques
>> Page 3: A Guide to Implementing Form Validation Techniques
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