“Feedback forms” considered harmful

The following form is intentionally broken: it has many of the typical mistakes in feedback forms. If you wish to send real feedback, please send E-mail to jukkakk.gmail.

Using a form as the only way of sending feedback via the Internet is one of the most common design mistakes on Web pages. It has become increasingly popular, since people fear that spammers use E-mail addresses from Web pages—as they actually do. Whatever you do, you’re going to need some tools or methods for dealing with spam, if you are on the Internet. Given that, does it really make sense to try to force people to inconveniences in order to contact you?

The following is an incomplete list of reasons why feedback forms are unavoidably far less useful than many authors think:

• HTML forms are by design simple and primitive, and they are implemented in browsers rather poorly. Even the simplest text editor or E-mail program has more tools for editing typed text than the implementation of input fields in browsers.
• In particular, no spelling checker.
• People usually know how to send E-mail, but they are not that familiar with forms.
• If a browser or the system crashes when a form is being filled out, all data is probably lost. Many E-mail programs produce automatic backup copies and also let the user save the data as desired.
• Disabled people often use special tools that make it possible to them to send E-mail. Such tools might not work with forms.
• The user does not get a copy of his data in any simple way. Compare this with the simple and well-known behavior of E-mail programs in archiving the sent mail.
• The user cannot send a copy of the data simultaneously somewhere, as he can in E-mail.

The following list contains common errors that make feedback forms even more inconvenient:

• reduced font size
• use of colors that reduces readability
• exotic font face
• generally making the appearance too styled, too different from defaults
• postage-stamp sized text input fields
• requiring fields that aren’t really necessary
• obscure error messages
• reset (clear) button, which almost never serves any useful purpose but often wipes out all user input
• no copy of data echoed to the user, so that the user cannot save a copy of his input.

Consider yourself as a potential customer of a company that has a form as the only way to contact it via the Internet, The company thereby says, by its actions, that your convenience is of little importance to it. If they verbally claim the opposite, you believe in what they do, not what they say.

This being said, I need to add that when used in addition to giving a normal contact address, a feedback form is useful. In particular, it lets the user send you feedback even if he is using a computer where he cannot use E-mail, e.g. a computer in public library or at an airport. But make sure you avoid the design flaws listed above.