Generally in your online store, a form is an element that lets your customer to submit information such as payment pages, contact forms, sign-ups; login all requires details from your customers.
Forms are important for two major reasons:-
- A badly-designed form can destroy your conversion rate.
- A well-designed form will help you to offer more value to your customers.
Before discussing tips for user-friendly forms, you need to know how to edit your Shopify store setup & what makes a form either nasty or nice.
You must be thinking that how to edit your Shopify forms?
Well, there are four ways to edit your Shopify forms:-
- Customizing images and working within your theme is one of the easy processes.
- Here you can also use a form builder for creating new forms.
- It’s a little difficult to develop a custom theme by editing your liquid code.
- You can also use specialized landing page builders.
A Shopify store service provider theme template decides the looks and feel of your online store. Working with a template is not that difficult because you can customize your theme settings directly from your Shopify admin with the help of theme editors.
Form builder provides you a high level of flexibility, in case you want to create a simple form in minutes. You can easily customize a pre-existing template & embed it on your store in minutes.
You can also create something with advanced functions with the help of features like answer piping, conditional logic, custom HTML/CSS, webhooks, integrations to create your required forms.
Of-course to edit your Liquid code is not an easy process. Shopify runs on its programming language, designed to make sectioned editing easier. For developers, learning to edit liquid code is reasonably straight forward.
Initially, coders might struggle with the format, but to access your theme’s code just select the option in your Shopify admin.
Is your form a trick or a treat?
When a customer enters your website, they don’t know if it’s safe or not, so you should think about your forms as though they are a mysterious creature blocking the hallway.
Now how to avoid spooking your customer?
Here, some things you need to avoid at all costs are as follows:-
Firstly, make sure that they can trust you. Just tell them exactly why you need their information, & what you plan to do with it
Then try not to ask for more information than is required. Because you have already explained what you need & why so asking for more details can cause unnecessary friction. After all, it is important to take all the fear & uncertainty out of the experience.
In the end, there should be some kind of reward that makes your customer remind that there is a reason they are giving up their time, effort & information. In short, turning your form into a treat can make the difference between a full sign-up list and an empty database.
These are top tips for making your Shopify forms more user-friendly!
Make the benefits clear:-
This is one of the popular techniques to make the users interested in your store; they will be willing to part with their personal information if they feel they are getting something in return.
This sign-up for a staples benefit account lists the potential in a separate block. Here each one is associated with an icon, to help the user visualize it. With so much to gain, filling the name and email in the form seems worth it.
Lower the hurdle:-
Excessive demands and detail create a serious hurdle for users. To make things easier, you should reduce the complexity and the amount of information you request. Keep the number of fields to a strict minimum, and pre-fill forms fields wherever possible.
For complex forms you can’t eliminate, break them down into organized, manageable sections (like “Billing Information”). This structures the form AND tells the user why it’s necessary.
While splitting your forms with a Shopify theme can often require custom code and technical work, using a form builder allows you to separate your forms into pages and sections with the click of a button.
Make them transparent:-
Customers want to know what they are getting into before they begin. Holding back the full details, to encourage users to start the process, will only lead to abandoned forms.
An easy way to outline the full process, without scaring customers away, is to use a progress bar. There’s another advantage to this strategy; it produces what is known as the Zeigarnik Effect.
The Zeigarnik Effect occurs when a task is partially completed. Not only do we feel a strong urge to complete a task, but we also remember incomplete ones more strongly than those we have finished. Amazon uses a progress bar to encourage users to complete their purchases. The cart icon is playful, and the use of color reinforces the impact of complete/incomplete sections.
Use soft gamification to encourage your customers:-
Gamification involves using game mechanics and rewards to make every day experiences more fun. Every time a user visits your website, they receive silent feedback telling them what sort of behaviors are rewarded. If you don’t manage these effects, you could be sending the wrong signals.
Soft gamification incorporates tacit rewards within everyday website features. Rather than presenting users with a literal game, the soft approach applies isolated elements of play. This could include congratulating your visitor with a “great job” when they complete a section of your form.
Hard gamification transforms an everyday activity into a game. Similarly, this system engages the visitor by appealing to competition and the pursuit of success.
Talk your users through the process:-
The process needs to be clear to customers. If they feel like are left to fend for themselves, with no clear instructions and no end-goal, they will simply abandon the page.
Friction will dissuade your visitors from completing their journey through the conversion funnel, let alone filling out your form. It is important to eliminate this friction by making the process of filling out a form as easy as possible.
Some plug-ins, such as website notifications, allow you to engage customers during their session. That means you can guide them through your forms and make sure they stay on your page. Accompanying your customers through their online journey will allow you to increase sign-ups without paying to acquire more traffic.
Bear in mind that, within the Shopify store universe, plug-ins and apps cannot be used on payment pages.In Shopify, you will get your queries to reply quickly through email, chat, or phone calls 24/7 with the Shopify support team. Shopify experts can troubleshoot any problems and find the best solution for an e-commerce store.
An easy way to reduce friction at the payment stage is by creating an interactive form that displays certain text or elements based on the respondent’s selections. This is easy to do using a form builder like Paperform that offers conditional display and logic.
Testing matters:-
The importance of testing your forms is a step that is often overlooked and undervalued by site owners. Customers will be very sensitive to even the slightest inconvenience, so testing is vital. Some responses might cause glitches, for instance, and these need to be found before you go live.
Asking a third party to test it is worth considering. This is because every developer experiences a cognitive effect known as the Curse of Knowledge. You understand your form and your intentions perfectly, so it’s hard to see them from an outsider’s point of view.
Analyzing your product from an uninformed perspective is one of the trickiest aspects of development, but a third party can more objectively assess your form to see if Shopify store setup is as user friendly as you think it is.
Conclusion:-
The customer will always perform a simple cost-benefit analysis. The problem is, this won’t be rational. Risks often seem much larger than they are and costs seem more significant. Customers need to feel safe and rewarded, even if they are not fully aware of this when they land on your site and find your forms. By lowering hurdles, validating them through gamification, and building trust through transparency you are redressing the balance. If you want your Shopify forms to be user-friendly, you need to design them for human brains.
