Ryan Johnston
Bargas-Avila, J.A., Orsini, S., Piosczyk, H., Urwyler, D., & Opwis, K. (2011). Enhancing online
forms: Use format specifications for fields with format restrictions to help respondents.
Interacting with Computers, 23(1), 33-39.
The journal discusses the importance of the online forms. In my opinion the theme of this
journal is to demonstrate the importance of the format conditions with respect to timing and
effectiveness for the users. The experiment was conducted to show how effective the guidelines
are when it comes to interactive online forms usually found on most websites such as banking
sites, retail store sites etc. The results indicated that the sites with visible format restrictions lead
to faster completion times, and lower number of user submissions. The forms with no format
restrictions lead to slow submission times and multiple amount of submissions.
In this experiment, four ways to communicate format restrictions were tested: format
with no visual restrictions, format examples, format specifications, and both format restrictions.
Data from questionnaires and interviews showed increased use satisfaction for the forms with
visible format restrictions prior to the form submission. There were 166 participants in this
experiment. The methodology of gathering data was to contact subjects via email from university
database and have the subjects input data into the online forms with different format
specifications which consisted of 15 questions including 7 questions with format restrictions.
Few other important key factors in this experiment were error prevention, user feedback, form
validation and most importantly, usability.
The results clearly showed the importance of the format restrictions. Using visual format
restrictions led to significantly less errors and enhanced user experience. Per the research, it is
better to state a clear and concessive instruction that helps the users to understand how they are
expected to input the data. After reading this article, I learned the importance of the format
conditions. I was unaware of such restrictions prior to reading this. I always wondered why some
sites specified how they expect the input to be while some don’t.