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
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?
