21 rules for an intelligent form design — Part 1

Part 1 of a 3 part series on the rules of designing forms that’ll improve your response rates.

As uncomplicated as form designs can be, you’ll find that the majority of the forms you come across are badly designed. If you’ve launched a survey yourself, you’ll know how hard it can be to get users to fill up the survey.

Traditional form fill up flow is something like:

Simplified view of a survey flow

I find this as an incomplete abstraction of the actual user intent & flow. The true flow is something like this:

Actual flow for a survey fill up.

With that in mind, let’s look at the rules for a good form design. I’ll break this into 3 sections:

1. Information flow
2. Form design/planning
3. Others

Information Flow

Rule 1 — Capture contact information first