When it comes to rethinking submission forms, the future of the web has the potential to be really beautiful. The goal of this project with First Descents was to rethink their robust form system to get better results with completion. After doing some research, I found that a multi-step form with a design element that would help users understand how far along they are in the form submission process might help increase completed form entries. After implementing this, form completions have increased by over 70%.
First Descent's has a robust program inquiry form. The original design was seeing a lot of dropped form submissions and they wanted to change that.
Initial research for possible solutions suggested that introducing a "status bar" to help users track their progress would help increase form submissions. When implementing this and testing in the prototype phase, it became clear that this was true.
My solution was to redesign the form and introduce a multistep system with a design element that would inform users how far along they were in the sign-up process.
Because the goal of this project was to increase form completions, I wanted to have a clean aesthetic that would not overwhelm users. Pairing this aesthetic with lifestyle photos worked well to create a balance that also worked within the First Descents brand standards.
I created two different prototypes and tested them with small groups to see which form would be most effective in getting completed submissions. The one with the "status bar" performed much better.
I designed mockups in Sketch and prototyped them using Invision to help users get a better understanding of how the final form would function.
Form completions increased by 70% within the first six months after launching the new inquiry form.
