Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Take What You Can Get - From Form Fills

Many times I've started to fill something out online and decided, ugh, not now, or, there is way too many questions here forget it.  Now, let's just say you decide to close your pof account because really there isn't anyone attractive anyway and up pops a survey so you can tell them what you really think.  Half way through this scroller of a survey you decide, over it, just wanted to let them know it sucked and being the good citizen that you are you scroll to the bottom and click submit. What next? An error? Seriously? The error is asking you to fill out the missing questions.  HA! Okay, that will never happen.  What's the lesson here? Take what you can get, from form fills.

As a web designer, put the submit button at the bottom of the page as normal giving the persistant user their reward.  Asynchronously collect the data after each question is answered by the user. Send it to the server and cache it in the session, stuff it in a database, just get the data somewhere so it can be analyzed.  If 20% of the users fill out a third of the questions, 40% fill out half, and the other 40% complete it, then you get 26 point lift simply by changing how you process the data.  Put the most important question first and you're probably looking at a 99% answer rate for that question for anyone that decides to even touch the survey.  This is a no-brainer, and everyone should take what they can get from form fills.

1 comment:

  1. What if you async save the fields on the fly, but you ALSO put the missing answers validation on the submit button? If it causes even one person to go back and answer one more question then you get lift. If they say fuck it and close the whole window you break even. You've already collected the fields async, and a successful submit would also have closed the window.

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