Micro-optimisation can reap macro-conversion

The other night I was finally sorting out a new mobile phone plan for my daughter, who manages to send text messages at an ever increasing rate.  So one of the new fixed top-up “unlimited” deals seemed the way to go.

Diving online with one major carrier appeared to provide a surprisingly quick and simple experience – until I clicked the submit button and received the following:

Example of poor form validation and error message handling

Huh?  ‘Contact’ number?  ‘Valid’?  Do they mean the telephone number?  If so, why isn’t that field flagged up or highlighted in some way?  And what’s wrong with the number anyway?

After a brief scan, the only thing left to try was to remove the spaces in the telephone number.  Bingo.

Dear oh dear.  It takes some effort to create a barrier on a form this straightforward.  And what a missed opportunity on such a short transaction process.  After all, getting customers through this form and the SIM card in their hand is the engine which drives these offers.  Ouch.

The ROI on the modest amount of effort to fix this is likely be…well…stratospheric.

Get the basics right

• Take the effort to write a bit of code to cope with the slight variations in how users will enter data.  As with credit card numbers, customers may want to break longer number strings into groups to aid with entry.
• Flag up the actual field which needs attention
• Ensure error messages reference the actual field label, as seen by the customer.
• Use plain language in describing any errors, not ‘tech-speak’.

Not only do we repeatedly see examples similar to this in our regular testing and research, but a recent econsultancy article has been posted about these issues as well.

The knowledge to design and code fully optimised forms has been around for a long time, over 20 years.  So it’s always surprising to still see these problems in the wild considering the impact they have on conversion.