2.20 Provide Accessible, Usable, Minimal Web Forms

Understandably, businesses want to know more about their customers, but a key part of sustainability is being ethical towards visitors and as such, the right to privacy is considered paramount. Don’t demand information when it’s not required and not only will this help visitors complete transactions quicker (reducing emissions), it will help with legal compliance such as GDPR.

Criteria

Form Simplicity: Remove unnecessary forms and reduce form content to the bare minimum necessary to meet the visitor’s needs and the organization’s business goals. Clearly communicate why a form is necessary, what its value proposition is, how many steps it will take to complete, and what an organization will do with collected data (informed consent).
Form Functionality: Avoid auto-completion / auto-suggest if it would prove unhelpful (to conserve bandwidth) whilst allowing autofill for ease of repeat entry (including the use of helpful tooling such as password managers).

Impact

Low

Effort

Low

Benefits

Environmental:
Optimizing forms reduces the resources necessary for visitors to complete them and products or services to process them, and in doing so, will reduce the emissions as a byproduct of avoiding using unnecessary hardware on the server or client-side.
Privacy:
Forms that include informed consent and helpful prompts about cookies, data collection, and so on improve data privacy.
Accessibility:
Ensuring your forms are well labeled, and accessible not only for those with disabilities but those using a range of different devices and inputs will reduce barriers, and thereby form processing will occur with higher success rates.
Economic:
If visitors can complete forms more successfully, they will suffer less frustration, and website owners will get fewer complaints, which will be beneficial in a potential reduction in support costs and result in more visitors likely to continue with purchases on a website.
Conversion:
Forms that are standards-based and well constructed which consider accessibility will improve conversion rates due to visitors being able to complete forms error-free more regularly.

GRI

materials: Medium
energy: Low
water: Medium
emissions: Low

Example

Guide to creating easy-to-use web forms and a guide to form design for complex applications.

Resources

View the Guideline