I was filling in a form recently for a new school my son is starting in September, and I was pretty horrified by it to be honest! It was riddled with errors and titles that didn’t match the question, as well as talking about enrolling in 2023, even though these kids are starting in 2025. I could rant about different aspects of it for a while, but one which really brought a lesson with it, was about their use of required fields. By this I mean, when I was filling in the form, there were some fields which NEEDED to be filled in – they were marked with an asterix and if I didn’t fill them in the form came back with big red errors when I tried to submit it.

The problem was, one of these in particular, I really couldn’t fill in! They’d asked if I was in the Services (army, navy, airfare etc.). To which I answered “no” – as will every parent I know filling in this form. The next question asked me which service I was in, with a free text input for me to type my answer. I left it blank – thinking that they couldn’t seriously expect me to have anything to write in there, and the form was probably cleverer than it looked and because I’d answered “no” to the first question, it wouldn’t expect me to fill in the second.

I should have known the form wouldn’t be cleverer than it looked.

User experience:

So, I submitted the form, got an error, and then had to think of something to write in the box. I opted for “N/A”. But I bet they get a lot of random answers in this box! Such as “I’m not”, or “no service” or “I’m not in the army”… all more data they’ve got to sift through. You shouldn’t be putting your visitors in the position of having to think what to do in a weird situation – it’s awful UX / user experience to be given a “required field” which you just can’t answer.

AND if they do any kind of searching and automated reporting, they leave themselves open to people typing “I’m not in the army or navy” and then those words could get muddled with positive results in their analysis!

Security and GDPR:

Not necessarily the case in this situation, but for another client I’m helping them streamline their site and roadmap their next 24 months of development and something I’m suggesting to them, is removing various fields that they currently ask for which I don’t think they need. Some double up on info, some are saying things are required which I think the visitor should be able to choose whether they fill in or not. And overall, every website custodian needs to remember that if you ask for data, you need to store it securely. So if you don’t really really need it, don’t ask for it, otherwise you’re going to be responsible for it until you delete it.

Solutions for conditional logic

So how could the school have done this form better? Well they could have only shown the follow up question if I’d answered “yes” to the first one, or they could have made it only a required field if I’d answered yes to the first one, both methods we’ve done for clients on forms in the past.

Or they could have set a drop down there instead – and they had plenty of dropdowns else where on the form (often with poorly chosen options to select from). Then it could have been a required field with the first option being “I’m not in the services” – not ideal asking me to repeat myself, but still an easy answer to give. And a drop down would mean the rest of their data was easy to sort as they’d be safely able to sort who had selected each of the other options.

Review your forms

Next time you can, review any data collection forms on your website and see if there’s anything you can do away with, or make unrequired to improve UX. And save yourself from having to store too much data.