While contact forms may be a clumsy way of communicating, they can get the job done. The problem: are they getting the job done effectively?

There are three common problems with contact forms. The first problem occurs when a form is too daunting for a user to complete. Usually, the form is either too long, confusing or asking for information deemed too personal. The second problem occurs when the user does fill out the form but the information provided is not useful. This is typically the result of an ill-prepared form that asks all the wrong questions. The third and final problem is technical in nature. If there’s a problem with the server and the form doesn’t submit correctly, not only could you lose the form data, but you’ll also have one annoyed user to deal with.

How can we improve the effectiveness of our forms? Here are a few guidelines that I try to follow whenever I create a form.

1. Eliminate all useless form fields. Only gather the data you really need. Do you absolutely need to get the user’s physical address? No? Take it out. The fewer fields, the less daunting the form is.
2. Mark required fields as required. It’s annoying when you fill a form out only to have it bounce back because a field you did not know was required was.
3. Don’t have too many required fields. Forcing people to do something is usually a bad idea. The more fields you “force” them to fill out, the more resistant they will become to filling out the form.
4. Use conventions. If you need a name, ask for their standard first and last name, but don’t ask for their surname or salutation. Most people will have to stop and try to figure out what you’re talking about otherwise.
5. Creativity is good, but don’t be TOO creative. Your form should look like a form. The form label should be positioned to the left or top of the field and everything should flow in a way that guides users straight to the submit button.
6. Don’t ask for weird information like a user’s SSN or Driver’s License Number. And if you need to collect that information, make sure your form is secure. People hate divulging secretive information, so let them be as anonymous as possible without compromising the usefulness of your form results.
7. Tell users explicitly what your privacy policies are before they submit the form. This can usually be accomplished with a little blurb of text stating that you will not divulge their information to third parties and so forth (and make sure you don’t!).
8. The submit button should be as obvious as possible. Most people expect it at the bottom of the form. Pad it up a little and make the text bold, and you should be good to go.
9. Do not use reset buttons. They’re useless, and if placed too closely to the submit button, might actually cause people to accidentally click it and lose their data. No good!
10. Be succinct in your field descriptions but don’t be cryptic. If your field requires a little explanation, provide it in a clear and concise manner.
11. Try to use JavaScript error handling so that incorrectly filled fields can be identified without going through a page refresh. This saves a lot of time.
12. If you must use some sort of human verification tool, make sure it’s readable. I know Google uses one and it’s atrociously unreadable and annoying.
13. Once a user has submitted the form, send them an auto-confirmation email. This confirms that you got their message on a more personal level. Don’t have the technical skills to do this? Try out a service such as Wufoo.
14. Make sure your forms always work. Test them weekly if you must. Otherwise, you’ll have people trying to use your form, losing data and getting frustrated. That’s bound to be a deadly combination.
15. Last, send users to a useful success page. Say more than just “thank you.” Give them somewhere else to go or something else to do. You’ve already hooked them.

Anybody else out there have some tips of their own for making forms more effective and useful? Share them!

First off, Facebook runs a service that should pretty much be hands-off. Beyond a few interface changes, I don’t really want to hear from Facebook. A controversial Terms of Service is not something I want to be concerned with. Unless a change is absolutely vital, don’t do it or bother users with it.

Facebook also needs to do a better job of understanding its user base. The new Terms of Service probably made perfect sense to Facebook management, but obviously the user base didn’t understand. If Facebook couldn’t figure that out, what else are they missing?

Finally, the response of pulling the new Terms of Service off and reverting to the old one was confusing. I understand the need to quell a potential user rebellion, but I guess the new terms really weren’t that important. Facebook’s most recent response has been to open their blog up to comments. Big deal. This should have been done from the beginning. Closing off your blog to your own users seems pompous and uncaring. But what’s funny is that when they did open the floodgates, the first post received over 2,000 comments (many of which were puerile and annoying).

So, in the end, Facebook is back on the old terms and now has given the promise to listen to its users by letting them post comments on their blog. Can I really expect someone at Facebook to sift through 2,000 comments? I doubt it. They don’t even read their emails (which is a whole different matter).

User rebellions seem to be a new phenomenon. Social networking services like Facebook are being held hostage by their users. And I must say this is a good thing. Digg has had a few rebellions and I think it served them well. When users are in control, users get what they want. And when users get what they want, the service improves. If only companies like Microsoft were held hostage by their users, it would be a whole different world.

Now, LeCompte isn’t too common of a last name so I can see why this might serve as a focal point of interest. I enjoy having an uncommon last name, too. I can be pretty sure when I see or hear it, it’s referring to me. I get to capitalize the "C" which is pretty cool. Telemarketers don’t know how to pronounce or spell it, so that acts as an immediate sort of spam filter.

So, when I get asked about my surname, I like to have a few facts tidbits available:

• Yes, the name is French. No, I have barely any French blood in me.
• What does the name mean? Well, "Le" is "the" in French, that’s easy. "Compte" is another word (hence the capitalization of "C" in my last name). Compte translates to "count" or "account" and is usually associated with banking. Therefore, my last name literally means "The Count" or "The Account." My guess is I had an ancestor who was an accountant. Since last names were derived from the trade a person mastered, this seems to make the most sense.
• No, I don’t like accounting.
• Some people don’t capitalize the "C" in "Lecompte". Why, I don’t know. A guess would be somewhere down the road someone got lazy and didn’t feel like capitalizing it. It probably got recorded on a birth certificate or some other official document as "Lecompte." I’m probably wrong.
• There is a town right in the middle of Louisiana called "Lecompte." An interesting tidbit is that I don’t think it’s named after my ancestors. Wikipedia states the history behind the name: "The town of Lecompte, Louisiana, was named after a famous racehorse owned by the Wells family who lived on a plantation south of the town. The horse’s name was LeComte. He won races at the Fairgrounds racetrack in New Orleans. During the days of the Lecompte High School, the yearbook was named the LeComte with a picture of the racehorse on the first page. When the railroad painted a sign on the side of the train depot years ago a "p" was added to the name and it has been Lecompte ever since."
• Even more interesting history behind the name of the town of Lecompte.
• There is a Lecompte Pie Festival in the town of Lecompte. Yes, I want to go.
• There is a former high school in the town of Lecompte called Old Lecompte High School. It has a tank in front of it.
• There’s a wealth of information about "LeCompte" (with proper spelling and capitalization) at lecompte.net. Apparently, the LeCompte’s had a big presence in Maryland.

That’s all I have for now. I should get more into this and learn to appreciate my ancestry. But for now, this seems to suffice as a good source of tidbits to throw out there.

I don’t think anyone besides web developers can truly appreciate what a monstrosity IE6 has been. You think doing your taxes is bad? Try getting hundreds of lines of CSS code to work with a now antiquated browser that somehow still attracts a notable percentage of internet users.

But I think that’s about to end.

Numerous companies and services including 37signal’s Basecamp and Google’s Gmail have begun to systematically phase out IE6. If you’re using IE6, these services still work, but new updates are not supported for this browser. Instead, alerts will pop-up asking you to please update your very old browser.

What irks me the most about this is Microsoft’s continued inability to push out updates. Their operating systems make the most annoying attempts to get you to subscribe to their automated updates and Microsoft can’t figure out how to do this in a user-friendly fashion. I mean, just look at Mozilla Firefox, arguably the best web browser out there. Firefox will very simply alert you when a new version of the software is available and give you the option to update now or later. The update process is very quick, does not require a restart and will even re-open the browser instance to where you were before the update. That’s what I call a good user experience.

But no, for Microsoft, you must go through the painful Windows update process which can take more than a few minutes. Their bloated browser packages take extended amounts of time to download and even more to install. It ties up computing resources and requires a needless restart.

Gee Microsoft, maybe this is why so many people are still stuck on IE6.

And sadly so. On some of the high-traffic sites I host, I still see 30% of Internet Explorer users on IE6 with 68% on IE7, 1% on IE8 (beta), and less than a percent on IE 5.5 (thankfully).

It has come time to finally start making plans to phase out support for IE6 in my own projects. I’ll make sure the site works in IE6, but beyond that, any little glitches will have to go by the wayside. There are far superior browsers with bigger user bases than IE6. I’d rather focus on them.

When you have groups of developers creating campaigns against your browser, you have problems.