If you want to maximize the revenue of your service you need to maximize completion rates of your web forms. Unless you have some revolutionary ideas to impress your visitors at first glance, it is not enough to simply enable users to sign up on your site. To make it possible for the service to reach a maximal exposure we, designers, need to provide users with a good user experience.

However, designing effective web forms isn’t easy. And it has one simple reason: nobody likes to fill in forms — neither offline nor online. Therefore, as designers, we need to figure out sound design decisions to make the form completion easy, intuitive and painless.

But how exactly can we figure out these decisions? Where should the link to the form be placed in the layout? How should we design it? How should we highlight the labels and how should we align them? How do web form design patterns look like in modern web-sites? These were exactly the questions we’ve asked ourselves. And to get the answers Smashingmagazine have conducted a survey and they are presenting the findings of the survey of current web form design patterns.

The main objective of the survey was to provide designers and developers with some intuition of how effective web forms are designed in practice; they also wanted to present some guidelines of how a user-friendly web form can be achieved. For this they have selected the first 100 largest and popular websites where web-forms (should) matter. Read more ..

• Web Form Design Patterns: Sign-Up Forms Part 1
• Web Form Design Patterns: Sign-Up Forms, Part 2