When driving responses online, a crisp and straightforward form is conversion gold.
With the implementation of HTML 5 in most next generation browsers, many new features will help you build simpler and more straightforward forms for your users that will help to increase your conversion rate.
For example, have you ever had problems with current forms such as:
- Trying to enter a date and not having the website tell you what format it should be in?
- Specifying your site and not knowing if you were supposed to enter the domain or a full URL?
- Navigating a drop down that had so many elements in it you had to scroll the screen to select what you wanted?
Some sites try and fix these issues with detailed instructions or JavaScript, but who really reads directions, and JavaScript can cause compatibility issues.
All of these examples above make your form confusing, but HTML 5 has some well thought-out solutions.
For instance, let’s take a look at the new date input:
Looks like a JavaScript solution, but it actually is a browser native control!
Here’s the code that was used to create that:
<input type="date">
Easy enough! There are options to use a week or a month selector as well, which use a similarly easy approach. Here’s a screenshot of the month:
There’s also a “range” input:
The new standard even includes a “URL” input type, which will automatically add https:// to your url if you forgot to include it.
Best of all, a new “email” type will automatically validate email addresses upon form submit – goodbye hideous regular expressions!
Here are other new field types that there are plans to implement too:
- Color
- Search
- Telephone
Unfortunately only Opera currently supports most of these features, but other browsers will be adding them shortly.
HTML5 is still in draft state, but typically browsers will start implementing new features even before it becomes the final specification.
Warning – while we’re looking forward to seeing how we can make HTML 5 drive higher conversion rates for our clients, it’s always a good idea to design your site for browsers a few generations back (check out point three in this post).
Alternatively, for our clients we plan to implement conversion rate split tests with HTML 5 forms segmented for appropriate browsers, and we’ll look forward to sharing that information in future posts – don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed if you’re interested.
A few other features of HTML 5 that we’re excited about, and will write on in the future include:
- Autofocus: delegate a specific field to become autofocused once the page loads.
- Placeholder text: prefill an input with a value that gets cleared as soon as it receives focus. Very handy if you want to give examples “e.g. LAX, or SFO”
- Embedded video and audio: No more browser plugins needed.
- Geolocation: automatically determines your location based on your hardware.
So be on the lookout for the next major releases of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome to see how well HTML 5 actually works.
In the meantime, if you’d like our team of expert marketers, programmers, and creative folks to drive your conversion rate through the roof just contact us today to see how we can work together!
