The dead of the contact form
Right, let’s get this straight. The contact form hasn’t died but in the last couple of days I wanted to study its use from other perspective.
I’ve come to realise that in many websites out there it might not be needed. I, as a web user, am very lazy and I want things as straight forward as possible. When browsing in general I don’t have time to learn “new interfaces” and the like - unless they are well implemented.
But thinking about how I react to contact forms made me write this post. When I send emails I love - well, let’s say “prefer” - my email program. With it I like the fact that I can:
- track who I sent messages and recover that when needed;
- format the content;
- make use of a spacious user interface;
- avoid validation waiting time.
I’m thinking of a very basic contact form here. The fields you can expect there are name, telephone, email and message. Do I need all that?
A name would be included when somebody signs the email. You don’t need to have their middle name, do you?
Telephone: please, this field is a pain to validate and you can’t set it as required otherwise nobody would fill the form in the first place. If they wanted to talk to you they would have called you so let’s leave it out.
Email makes sense, you want to be able to respond to your visitor! But then comes the problem of users mistyping their emails. You can surely include a second field to double check but if somebody sends you an email from Outlook you’ll know you got the right address.
Finally, the message field. Visitors need to fit all what they want to say in a 300px by 200px box. Give them a rest! An email program let’s them change the size of the writing area on both dimensions. That’s usable.
Also the formating issue, they might want to express themselves better by formatting their message but we developers are only concerned with a potential client running malicious php code or a sql injection through the textarea so we strip them out of any formatting capability.
And I’m almost forgetting the new trend, the CAPTCHA field to make sure you’re human. Do you see where I’m going?
After all this I thought why not using the email link instead? With some care it can deliver quickly and effectively. You need to watch out for spam bots looking for email addresses in your code but there are ways around that.
Again, I’m not for killing the feedback form. It has been a long run from the first cgi scripts to the responsive AJAX interactions of today but we need to understand that in some cases implementing them might be a bit of an overkill.
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