Web Forms: Costly Mistakes You Want to Avoid

Every day we interact with web pages, mobile applications, Web Apps and, for the past few years, what are also known as PWAs (Progressive Web Apps). These artefacts that make up the rich world that the web has become all have at least one thing in common: the forms that allow us to interact with its content, its creators and many other people.

These forms have evolved quite a bit since the early days of the web. The first sources I found during my research date back to an interface called Archie, which offered a form for searching an index using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) on a local network. Nothing that didn't involve a great deal of interaction with others.

With the Web Forms 1.0 standard, many of the new features adopted around these forms then stagnated until the need for change arose with mobile usage, particularly between 2008 and 2015. In fact, the Web Forms 2.0 standard was first written in 2008, the same year that I started to become a professional in the web field.

The Web Forms 2.0 standard introduced with HTML 5 has brought us many new types of form fields: e-mail, URL, telephone, etc., as well as new APIs (Application Programming Interface) in JavaScript, and continues to evolve today much faster than in the past. Don't wait for a new version of HTML to update: HTML is a Living Standard, meaning that it has been constantly evolving since version 5.

These technical developments, these fields and other new features are designed to keep pace with changes in usage, particularly in the habits of users of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, but also to enhance the possibilities for interaction on all the devices we use today.

**Despite all this progress, it's not uncommon to find forms with a deplorable user experience.

How did we get to this point when technology is supposed to be helping us to improve the digital services we offer?**

My answer in one sentence: it's a gentle mix of responsibilities between (customer) service, design and ergonomics, accessibility and technology, which is leading our users to a deterioration in their experience of our websites and, more particularly, our forms. In other words, user and customer experience is a multi-stage, multi-stakeholder process that can be likened to a machine: if a single cog doesn't do its job, the whole process can go wrong.

How can we introduce a better level of experience for our visitors? How can we monitor and measure this quality?

Between accessibility, ergonomics, user experience and search, user interface, HTML and CSS, let's take a quick look at the state of the art of web forms, and how we can improve all of this.

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