I recently came across an interesting post from Rethink. The aptly titled “Five more reasons your website stinks” post had a great little tidbit (reason #10a) about uber long forms complete with CAPTCHA’s that actually deter people from contacting you. I found myself asking, “Why are we still using them, in the first place?”. In today’s landscape of instant communication, the contact form just feels archaic – inconvenient and not very user-friendly. The entire process of completing a typical form takes way too long and often requires the user to surrender too much irrelevant information.
So why do we use forms in the first place? SPAM. Evil SPAM bots have forced regular old mailto links off the page altogether. The bots easily spider page content searching for @ and .com/.ca/.net/.everything combinations. Embedding the recipient address in a form worked until bots were programmed to automate the entry process and compromise the form. Enter the CAPTCHA, an undecipherable, accessibility-hindering, annoying little samurai sent to halt the nasty bots from entering Form Kingdom… and in the process upping your abandonment rates to record levels. So why do we still use forms for simple contact?
Well we shouldn’t, period. Or, at the very least, we should give users some options. Why not adopt the communication technologies and channels of your end users? At this moment these are based around social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Think about the difference in user experience between offering nearly real-time interaction or expecting someone to wait over an indiscriminate amount of time for a response to a submission (assuming one actually arrives at all). Which scenario better represents your company’s value proposition?
Yes, we already know you’re worried about resources… but don’t you already have a resource assigned to reply to those form submissions? Have those same individuals monitor the newly-minted contact channels as well. Chances are these team members are already well-versed in company policy, legal, and brand positioning and should be able to easily adapt to the new technology. It’s really about improving user experience and engagement by removing barriers between the user and the brand or company.
I guess the one thing to remember about all of this… We don’t build websites for ourselves, we build them for users. So try and give them what they want, and always what they need.
So wanna talk? Tweet me here @mrbrain or here @dashboarddotca or leave me a comment using the form below (CAPTCHA FREE!).
p.s. the answer is 56.
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