21 rules for an intelligent form design — Part 2

Part 2 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.

In the last article, we covered the following rules:

Rule 1 — Capture contact information first.
Rule 2 — Background save the form at every step.
Rule 3 — Validations should be done in-line
Rule 4 — Errors should be verbose.
Rule 5 — Have an objective in mind.
Rule 6 — Have an intelligent survey engine.
Rule 7 — Use the Foot in the door approach.

We’ll continue with the remaining rules, below:

Rule 8 — Avoid adding biases to the questions

Once you have a hypothesis, you have to ensure that you’re selecting the right fields that can support the hypothesis. Pay attention to the question design: