Online Form Builders And Emotional Design

Anis Aliabadi
3 min readJun 26, 2022

When it comes to forms and answering questionnaires, we say Ahhhh.

It is so hard to force people to answer surveys. Sometimes researchers use bonuses like giving money or free services. How can we ease this situation and make people happy and committed when they are answering a survey?

I guess Typeform’s designers have thought about it more than Google designers.

As an example, the picture below is the process of signing up. Simply by pressing the Enter key we can go to the next question.

Moreover, we can use the keyboard to answer questions (pressing A for choosing A). Even though these kinds of questions were not mandatory and I could skip -what I always do-, it was so pleasant for me to answer them.

The process of answering the questions as a participant is also the same. Questions are shown one after another -easy to answer- which is like a conversation. Typeform cleverly helps researchers to categorize their questions. At the start of each section, you can notify what the next questions are about. This helps users to be ready before answering them. It reminds me of the process of examination when doctors talk about what they want to do and ensure patients follow what is the procedure. It makes participants calm and ready to respond to questions.

Typeform has designed all these journeys based on human emotions. Most of the time we forget emotion in design. Sometimes emotions are the primary reason for what we are doing, like playing video games. Regarding the online surveys, emotion is not the primary reason but considering users that are doing a repetitive job, feeling the right sort of feelings might help them keep focused while answering the questions. In these kinds of services, we need to arouse users’ emotions to keep them going to answering questions thoughtfully.

We can say emotion affects the bottom line in business. If participants feel happy, they tend to be more productive. So researchers will choose a service that can engage participants more, and increase their response rate.

Conclusion

Emotion is important to us as humans, but it’s also important from a business point of view.

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Anis Aliabadi

Aproduct designer, researcher. I keen on human-computer interaction