From the Experts: Improve this form

[AJ Siegel]

The article is a companion to the Now Learning course From the Experts: User Experience (UX) Leading Practices

 If you want to learn the practices that help you deliver great self-service experiences to your end users, enroll in the course. 

Introduction

In the activity, I presented a version of a form that was fairly complex. It asked the user questions they not be equipped to answer and presented some questions poorly.

Instead of having to train the users how to properly design this form, we can make some obvious improvements and reduce the learning curve to submit a request.

Here's what I did?

If I were to take a stab at changing this form to follow the leading practices outlined in this course, my first step would be to understand what is the information the user has when they are ready to create a new content item request. With this in mind, I would design a specific view for the requestor that is tailored to their universe of information.

Changes

• Limit the number of fields the user sees to the ones they truly need to provide
• Since these are infrequent users, ask questions in a clear way... don't expect the user to know your specific jargon.
• Eliminate the tier (priority) question as target publish date is more relevant to help the team prioritize the work
• Provide help text for items that need more context (e.g. Content Task Type)
• Fix the date format to align with users (US-based) mental model for dates

Example of a improved form for collecting content requests.

 

What changes would you make?

With the leading practices in mind, how else would you improve this form to get the right data, easily from the requestors?

[Trudi Belton]

Let's swap out KB for Knowledge in the KB Article link.  And we have Add attachments but not really much advice about what should be attached.  The explanation paragraph could expand a little to suggest uploading as attachments for one or more of these.  But it's really very good 🙂

[David Nottingha]

Personally I abhor radio buttons as I find them dated and much prefer the drop down select box. I am also not a huge fan of checkboxes but they are useful at times.

[David Arbour]

@David Nottingha but radios mean less clicks. I think most users prefer this, as long as you only have a few options.

[David Nottingha]

That's a good point @David Arbour so maybe horizontal radios would be ok....really a personal aesthetic preference from my POV. Perhaps if the choices are 4 or less I might be more inclined for Radio buttons.