Are enquiry/contact forms needed?
Tuesday 22 July 2008There are a lot of websites that use enquiry forms. Some are huge corporate sites, some are tiny one-man bands. When re-designing the epiGenesys site I started to question how useful they actually are. Are they there for a currently relevant reason or are they just a relic of past web design formalities?
I use the internet. A lot. Do I use enquiry forms? Not if I can help it. I’m always scared that the data will disappear into the ether or drop into some rusty old email account that’s checked once in a blue moon. Somehow, tracking down an email address that is displayed in any old corner of the site seems, to me, more reliable than an enquiry form. But that’s just me.
People might not want to use the phone, especially when they don’t understand the domain. They could want time to consider and compose their enquiry. Working and living IT means it can be quite easy to make the assumption that everyone is comfortable with sending emails, but this isn’t always the case. If this was a site selling knitting patterns could we make this assumption? I don’t think so. Enquiry forms are intuitive for non-technical people.
Enquiry forms are also open to spam. One way to stop this is to add a Captcha. Whilst this may stop rogue use of the form I feel it says “I don’t trust you” to any website viewers and potential clients. They also have usability issues and, ultimately, looks messy. But, displaying your email address also attracts spam. There are ways round this also (obfuscation using odd punctuation, replacing with images etc.) but these are less user friendly.
The new epiGenesys site is not going to have an enquiry form. There will be a boldly displayed email address and a phone number. If people are not comfortable with emails then they are invited to use the phone. We believe this covers all bases and keeps the contact page a lot cleaner. Displaying the email address will result in spam but probably no more than the existing enquiry form already does (and most of that should be caught by Google’s lovely spam filtering). But really, has anyone ever had an important or useful email from an enquiry form anyway?
2 Responses to “Are enquiry/contact forms needed?”
As an old Genesys student I can say that you’re almost definitely wrong about contact forms. At our company we get a 50 / 50 split between our enquiry form and the telephone, almost no-one emails. People like to fill out contact forms as it is quick and easy, right there on the page. It’s also worth noting that free email accounts don’t integrate very well with mailto links, and as such copy and pasting of emails is required.
By Ash on Nov 5, 2008
Ash, glad to hear enquiry forms are working for you. I probably didn’t summarise this post quite as well as I could have. I believe there are benefits to Contact forms (i.e. ease of use) but, as ours was getting no use, felt there was little need for it on our Contact page. Maybe I was a little hasty in removing it? Given your feedback, it could be making an apperance in the near future!
By j.almond on Nov 9, 2008