Contact forms, yes or no!

djk1000

Howdy,

I was looking for some advice from you guys on web contact forms. We're having a discussion about this in work for our own website. It's 50/50 split between,

1. Yes use a contact form, makes it easier for people to get in touch, we can steer them to input the information we want.

2. Contact forms are old fashioned, these days, email links work fine and are less confusing.


They are some of the arguments, do any of you have opinions, or what would really be excellent is links to any usability studies or anything that backs up the argument either way?

Thanks in advance

DJK

TheWaterboy

Im all for contact forms and have noticed a huge increase in the amount of website queries I receive since I put a Contact Form button on every page on my site. I notice alot of the time people are checking out a particular product and want to query about it - Instead of having to go to a new page or find an email address they can just fill in the popup contact form.

For commercial business websites though an email address would suffice I think.

cormee

djk1000 wrote: »

Howdy,

I was looking for some advice from you guys on web contact forms. We're having a discussion about this in work for our own website. It's 50/50 split between,

1. Yes use a contact form, makes it easier for people to get in touch, we can steer them to input the information we want.

2. Contact forms are old fashioned, these days, email links work fine and are less confusing.


They are some of the arguments, do any of you have opinions, or what would really be excellent is links to any usability studies or anything that backs up the argument either way?

Thanks in advance

DJK

How strange. Of course you include a contact form - you also give an email address for people wanting to use that, you also give a telephone number and your company address.

Not everyone's email account is web-based and someone wanting to contact you might not be sitting at their desk at work, or at home, some others might want to contact you using their work email address from home, etc. etc.

Who in God's name suggested contact forms were old-fashioned? That's a ridiculous claim...fire the fool, or at the very least exclude them from participating in any more discussions regarding your company's website!

A couple of points off the top of my head.

An e-mail link won't work with webmail services (in general - there are ways to get it working for some services). A copy/paste of the email address bypasses the whole issue, but some folks are lazy...

Some workplaces block access to the webmail services that most people have their personal accounts on, and your visitor may be reluctant to use work email to contact you.

If you've got an e-mail link on a web page, it's likely to be harvested for a spam database. There are various types of obfuscation you can use to help counteract this.

I'd generally advocate using every means of contact possible (as long as you monitor them) - email, contact form, address, phone number, skype, IM, twitter, facebook. It's a balance between offering your visitor choice, and offering them too much choice, I suppose.

Essien

They're so simple and unobtrusive, I don't see why they would be considered a bad idea.

trad

The biggest problem with either is that most of the time nobody answers them.
If I see a personalised email address I'm more likely to use it ie. john@boards.ie . Why not put a photo and name of the person who the customer will be dealing with and personalise it.

Just my 2c worth.

was.deevey

Jeeze use a form !!

... anything that makes getting a lead easier IS a good thing in any business

Not to mention you can fiter more query types in a form with a few dropdown menu's

A contact form makes it easier even if its just 3 lines... name / phone / email and a name on the same page e.g expect a call from Joe Bloggs to personalise it more perhaps.

I might include the email as a clickable link or image, but do get some sort of spam protection or yes you'll be harvested pretty fast and everyone in the company will start getting sh1t mails

Oh one really important things to get all those emails / queries into a database if you can.

cormee

was.deevey wrote: »

A contact form makes it easier even if its just 3 lines... name / phone / email

Good point - keep the form fields to an absolute minimum, users don't particularly like filling out forms, so when you're designing it ask yourself 'which is more important, this form field, or a lead?'

This book is excellent: http://www.amazon.com/Web-Form-Design-Filling-Blanks/dp/1933820241/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1292496578&sr=1-1

was.deevey

BTW ... one more thing

these days, email links work fine

I would never use a mail client to send mails from contact pages but rather use a hotmail / yahoo webmail based address so I disagree they dont work fine .. i need to copy paste from one location to another, sign into my yahoo/hotmail/gmail, THEN take the time to compose a mail rather than just clicking a few radio's and dropdowns and finally sending.

Interestingly enough you are more likely to get me using one of my "real" addresses on a professional looking contact form requesting a set of information.

djk1000

Well, it seems to be clearly on the side of contact forms. Thanks for replying, I have some good arguments to use now.

DJK

Eoin

I like both - I like contact forms so I don't have to log into my gmail account, but I like to see email links as well so I can copy it locally. I've never heard of someone complaining that a company was too easy to contact, so include both - it's a no-brainer.

Dean820

Why not include an email link and a contact form? Best of both worlds.

tricky D

Users want to interact in all sorts of ways. All of them should be catered for as appropriate:

Email and form at the very minimum
Phone and post for a consumer site
and a few other methods can sometimes be apt

Let the user decide.

I wouldn't be impressed by someone suggesting email only.

lil_lisa

One thing I hate about some contact forms is that they make some fields necessary, like phone number or address or something. You shouldn't have to give this information; name, email and comment/information fields should be the only ones required so they can contact you back but I don't always want to give my phone number out when asking about prices or location or something.

cormee

lil_lisa wrote: »

One thing I hate about some contact forms is that they make some fields necessary, like phone number or address or something. You shouldn't have to give this information; name, email and comment/information fields should be the only ones required so they can contact you back but I don't always want to give my phone number out when asking about prices or location or something.

Marketing people get very excited (and stop listening to designers' suggestions) when they see an opportunity to gather information. Information that will sit in an Excel spreadsheet, or salesforce database if they're really fancy, and never see the light of day again.

tricky D

Every less than necessary field, especially mandatory ones, is another opportunity/reason to bail out.

Liam Byrne

tricky D wrote: »

Every less than necessary field, especially mandatory ones, is another opportunity/reason to bail out.

+1

Not only that, but the unbelieveably arrogant and annoying American ones that refuse to countenance and accept valid addresses that don't have postcodes or phone numbers that aren't in THEIR format mean you can't deal with them. :mad: