Content design
for forms
Course overview
Whatever stage of your content design career you're at and whatever content you're working on, asking questions in the right way can make all the difference when designing forms. It can increase completion rates, reducing the number of users that don't complete a journey.
There's often a focus on the technology and interaction design when creating forms online. But technology can't make up for asking the wrong thing, asking something in the wrong way or just asking a bad question.
You need to work what it is you want to find out, how you're going to use the information and then find the best and most understandable way to ask the question to get the answer you need.
Delivery: in person
Class size: up to 8 people
Duration: 1 day
Cost:
per team from £4,000 plus VAT
per person from £500 plus VAT
What the course covers
Your trainer Caroline will ask you to send her examples of forms that you are working on yourself, or that you’d like to work on, and will base the exercises on the examples that she receives. You’ll contribute your ideas on your own examples and on the ones that other attendees suggest.
Over the course of the day you'll look at:
Caroline's ‘three layer’ model of forms as interaction, content, and service
writing good questions
creating accessible forms
editing instructions and other content related to forms
making sure error and help messages are actually helpful
What you’ll learn
After completing this course, you will:
understand the importance of knowing why you're asking a question
understand the importance of knowing what you will do with the data collected
recognise the difference between a good question and a bad one
be able to write well constructed and thought out questions
have worked on real examples that you can take away and implement
We tailor all exercises in the course to make them relevant to you and your organisation.
If you’d like to focus on a particular area, we can adjust the course content to suit your needs. Or we can add elements from other courses, or create something completely bespoke for you. See how our training works.
Your trainer
Caroline Jarrett has been a forms specialist since 1994 when she became fascinated by the problem of how to make forms easy to fill in. She advises organisations on how to improve websites and business processes that include forms or surveys.
Caroline has an MA in Mathematics from Oxford University, an MBA and a Diploma in Statistics from the Open University, and is a Chartered Engineer.
She is co-author of Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability (Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier) and of User Interface Design and Evaluation (The Open University/Elsevier) and author of Surveys that Work: A practical guide for designing and running better surveys.
Feedback foR this course
I thoroughly enjoyed it [the training]. The biggest takeaway for me was the framework you've created for tackling this work. It is so useful and practical, and it was fantastic to put it all into action on the day. I will be implementing these exercises immediately.