During a recent trip to the Czech Republic, I purchased a cell phone card and attempted to register it on T-Mobile’s website. I was puzzled by the way the form was designed and it took me a few tries to make it to Step 2 in the registration process. Can you figure out why? Take a look:

My confusion was due to the following reasons:

• The next action link is located outside of the visual area of the form field (the gray box), so I didn’t notice it at first; I hit “Enter” instead, which gave me an error message
• Once I noticed the action link, I hesitated because the link label (”Continue in Registration”) is too vague
• I am used to see a button, rather than a text link, right next to a box I have to fill out. I don’t know if my information will be saved when I click the text link.

In my “What can we learn from this?” tradition, here are three tips taken from this example that you can use to improve your forms:

1. Group items that go together

In this example, a grey box was used around the form field; that makes sense, since there are other elements in the page that are not part of the form and so it helps the user to focus on it. However, the next action link should have been included in that space, because it is also part of the form.

2. Respect users expectations

Even though the way we are using forms is evolving with new web technologies, people are still used to things working a certain way. For example, most users expect a button or button-like graphic next to a form field they have to fill out rather than a text link. User-conscious sites such as Backpack and Smugmug still adhere to that principle:

3. Use specific words for action items

The word “registration” was mentioned four times in the T-Mobile page, all within a few lines of each other. Rather than using generic words that can confuse the user, try verbs that indicate what the next logical step is, such as “Save”, “Publish” or “Send”. Garrett of yourtotalsite.com says it best: Button labels should communicate what happens when they are pressed and use language that users understand.