How to Design Effective Forms With UX Best Practices

When our goal as web creators is to build a user-friendly website form, the question we need to keep asking ourselves is: “How much effort am I asking of the user?”. The reason behind this question is simple: the more effort involved, the less usable the form. A form with sub-par usability is unlikely to deliver the results you’re looking for. 

This element of usability is what UX experts at Nielsen Norman Group call interaction cost: 

“The sum of efforts — mental and physical — that the users must deploy in interaction with a site in order to reach their goals.” 

Our goal when designing a web form is always to reduce the interaction cost as much as possible. According to UXPin’s Marketing Director, Chris Stryjewski, one of the ways to do that is to ‘ensure consistency across all the UI components used in forms’. This is made possible by refining the UX to the best of our abilities: minimizing the number of actions and behaviors required (reading, scrolling, clicking, typing, information hunting, cognitive load, attention switches, and so on.) 

But does minimizing the number of user behaviors jeopardize the amount of information you’ll obtain from those users? It doesn’t have to  — as we will now discuss.