    
|
|
|
W3C announced today a Workshop on the Web of Things, 25-26 June 2014, in Berlin (Germany). The event is hosted by Siemens.
The Web of Things is expected to have broad and sweeping economic and societal impact. Open standards will be critical to enabling exponential growth of the kind we experienced with the early days of the Web.
This workshop will examine the potential for open standards as a basis for services, either between devices, at the network edge, e.g. in home hubs, or in the cloud. It will discuss the use of web protocols and scripting languages for implementing services, the need for APIs for implementing drivers for specific IoT technologies, a shared approach to describing services as a basis for interoperability, and the underlying use of HTTP/COAP, Web Sockets, and EXI/JSON for RESTful services.
W3C membership is not required to participate. The event is open to all. All participants are required to submit an expression of interest or a longer position paper by 25 April 2014.
]]>
Web forms are the stars of any respectable landing page though they’re often taken for granted. They receive all the personal information of your leads or buyers, so that you can start to move them down the sales funnel. Depending on how you design your web forms, you can expect greater or fewer conversions.
In general, hardly any site visitors want to spend too much time filling out web forms, so you’ll have to focus on brevity first and foremost. Of course, you may also want to balance that with the knowledge that longer forms tend to receive higher-quality leads. At the end of the day, designing web forms should be about the user experience above all else.
They should be very visible, but not intrusive; clear-cut, but not dumbed down; and minimalistic, but still not boring. Follow these best practices, and watch your website’s conversion rate begin to noticeably improve.
Sometimes, failing to pay attention to what specific fields you include on your web forms can cost you a whole lot of money, as none other than Expedia found out. A while ago, the online travel company had a “company” field right under the “name” field on its web form on its site. This “company” field, in spite of it being totally optional to fill out, confused many would-be Expedia customers who actually entered their bank names in this field.
As a result, they also went on to input the address of their bank in the “address” field; they were supposed to input their home address in that field. Unsurprisingly, credit-card processing failed because address verification failed since the information in the field was not the cardholder’s address.
Long story short: This confusion on the company’s web form ended up costing it $12 million in lost profits per year. Expedia was only able to find this problem and correct it after performing thorough data analytics. Moral of the story: When designing your web forms, don’t pull an Expedia and make them confusing enough to lose successful conversions and profits.
Web designers can help increase conversions for a website by focusing on the specific length of web forms. In general, it is highly recommended that all web forms are shorter rather than longer. Research like this case study has confirmed that site visitors are very fond of shorter web forms that have fewer fields.
Imaginary Landscape is a web design and development firm that experimented with various lengths of contact forms on its website. The first form they used was an 11-field one; the second they used was a mere four fields long. Guess which one scored the most conversions? If you said the four-field one, then you’re spot on. The conversion ratio jumped by a whopping 120% compared to the 11-field contact form.
It’s also interesting to point out that the quality of the submissions stayed constant in the drop from 11 fields to just four.
Today, Imaginary Landscapes uses a mere, three-field contact form on its homepage.
However, other research does suggest that shorter web forms can actually reduce the quality of your leads who fill out your shortened forms. Essentially, what this means is that there is a tradeoff between quantity and quality when you cut down on the number of your fields. So if you want higher-quality leads—as in leads who provide more information about themselves and are more likely to actually convert—then you may want to stick with longer forms nonetheless.
It’s also very wise to consider implementing side-by-side field captions in your web forms. This is a smart alternative to what too many designers do incorrectly, which is to place the field labels on top of the fields. As a result, the entire web form will appear longer than it really is. This is a practice best avoided by putting any field captions horizontally and on the same line as the blank fields.
An ideal example of this web form best practice can be seen in the sign-up page of Spiro Fit, which is an online fitness network. Interestingly, the Spiro Fit web form is quite long due to the number of fields that it boasts, yet it still manages to stay mostly above the fold because the field labels are right next to the blank fields.
Sometimes, there is absolutely no substitute for being unique. When you’re unique, you draw attention to yourself, and that makes you memorable. This applies to web forms as well. When all of your competitors are designing theirs to look and feel the same, your very unorthodox approach to web forms can be a very pleasant change for your site visitors and users.
Case in point is the account login for SVN2FTP. Right away, the user is drawn to how attractively unorthodox the fields are. Instead of entering their information into a plain, old, boring box, users can enter their information into fields that are made to resemble notebook pages. This unexpected fun factor alone can increase subscribers to a service.
The most obvious aspects of web form best practices seem to go unnoticed by some designers. If the information that’s submitted to web forms is ever compromised, then your site has a disaster on its hands since stolen personal information means your business takes a humongous hit. It may not even recover. These days, you just can’t err too much on the side of caution when it comes to your site visitors’ personal data.
It’s a good idea to utilize an SSL certificate on your whole domain. With this, your users aren’t going to just be protected when they sign up, but their whole viewing session is going to be protected thanks to https. Essentially, if your SSL certificate is working, a browser’s address bar will turn green, like this.
While a precaution like this isn’t a must, it definitely doesn’t hurt to go a little bit further to protect the personal data of your site visitors, leads or buyers. Your users will feel a bit safer trusting you with their personal data, and this works to build trust over the long term.
There’s nothing worse than web forms that aren’t labeled very clearly. Unclear web forms and fields inevitably lead to user frustration due to a very poor user experience. In addition, the friction in the transaction increases, meaning that successful conversions will be hampered, too. This can’t be stressed enough.
The format that your users will rely on to enter their information has to be crystal clear. There should not be any doubt whatsoever about what is supposed to go in which blank field. You shouldn’t leave it up to chance at all. Including just a few extra words next to blank fields can make all the difference when it comes to getting site visitors to properly input their personal information.
Take this example from The Bullitt Agency, which describes itself as a boutique agency for the top international DJs and producers. Looking at the Agency’s contact form, you can tell that its designer is a big believer in the axiom of “less is more.” The contact form is very short with only four fields, but the best part is how its ultra-simple approach means everything is labeled clearly.
If filling out a field is up to the user’s discretion, then it’s clearly labeled with an “optional” tag, and even something like putting the word “your” in front of email address can markedly cut down on confusion.
Although lots of people dread filling out web forms, they shouldn’t be taken for granted. In fact, that is precisely the reason why it demands that you spend extra time on them to make them as painless as possible for site visitors. It’s really not rocket science, when you think about it; it’s just using common sense to ensure that your users are not turned off by unsightly or irritating web forms.
Web forms that fail to follow these best practices in the industry will have a negative impact on basic things such as the user experience and conversions. This will work to increase friction, and that will only lead to fewer subscribers, leads or buyers. Taking a bit of extra time and care to make sure that you design effective web forms is definitely necessary.
Featured image/thumbnail, design image via Shutterstock.
| 6 Professional iOS7 App Design Templates – only $29! |  |
History is about to be made.
Step aside white voters… in March, Latinos will officially become the largest demographic group in California.
The state budget predicts that Latinos will comprise 39% of the population this March, surpassing whites. But bigger numbers may not mean bigger power.
The Guardian puts it this way:
Of 53 million Latinos, seven million are undocumented immigrants, five million are legal immigrants who are not citizens and cannot vote, and 17 million are too young to vote (for now). That leaves an electorate of just 24 million, of which less than half votes, compared to around two-thirds of whites and African Americans.
Unlike in some African American communities where churches have boosted political culture and involvement, Latinos are still finding their footing as a political force.
Democrats have taken votes for granted, using Latinos to get elected and then largely ignoring their concerns in favor of other issues. Hence President Obama being known to some as “Deporter-In-Chief.”
Obama’s administration has deported more immigrants than Bush’s after promising reform to Latinos in the last election. Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, remarked:
As a community we’re still developing, maturing. With every electoral cycle Latino political impact is increasing but we understand there is much more to do.
Still, with growing numbers, Latinos can expect to make considerable gains down the road if they mobilize. Watch the next Presidential campaign where candidates will be wooing Latino voters and immigration reform may take center stage.
What impact do you predict for this historic trend?
]]>
Have you ever been overworked at a job? Okay, silly question…
When you were overworked… did you get overtime pay?
If not, help may be on the way…
As part of a recent push to alleviate economic inequality, President Obama has ordered the Labor Department to review federal rules on overtime pay.
The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 allows the White House to regulate overtime pay for businesses participating in interstate commerce.
Since 1975, the Labor Department has required that employees under a certain income threshold be paid time-and-a-half beyond 40 hours a week. This was done to discourage employers from overworking people and to boost the wages of the working poor.
President Obama wants to see that income threshold raised in order to include many managerial positions that involve long hours but no overtime pay.
Not unlike the administration’s push to raise the minimum wage, this proposal has prompted debate among economists and politicians alike. Critics fear requiring more overtime pay could force employers to slow hiring or let people go.
Do you think the White House should be working overtime to get this enacted?
]]>Rob Gravelle demonstrates how to use the Moment.js library to parse dates from a string while highlighting potential gotchas with regards to GMT offsets.
]]>|
|
Google manages to invest in fundamental research without having a traditional lab in which to do it.
Research vice presidents at some computing giants, such as Microsoft and IBM, rule over divisions housed in dedicated facilities carefully insulated from the rat race of the main businesses. In contrast, Google’s research boss, Alfred Spector, has a small core team and no department or building to call his own. He spends most of his time roaming the open plan, novelty strewn offices of Google’s product divisions, where the vast majority of its fundamental research takes place.
]]>echExcel Inc today announced DevSuite 9.3, the latest edition of its ALM platform with integrated Requirements, Quality and Agile Management.
]]>