07 Mar 2007 2257H

How not to design a form

Some people look askance when I say user experience people don’t just design the way people interact with websites, but all kinds of information, services, pretty much anything where people have to try and accomplish something. Don’t believe me? Fine. FINE. I’ll show you.

Close readers of my blog know I am going on my fourth XBox 360: the first three had various kinds of manufacturing problems around video display, headset communication in online game play and finally another bad DVD drive. The last straw came around Christmas, and so after spending several hours talking to India and the Philippines in support calls, they finally sent me a pre-paid box to mail it back to the Service Center in Texas. In the box was a form. Here’s the first half of the form below:

Top of XBox Send Instructions

And so you follow the instructions, and everything is going well. You have boxed up the unit for sending back to the Service Center. You tape up the box with the seal and you place the return label over the existing shipping label. You’re about to call or go to your UPS when you suddenly notice this at the bottom of the form:

Bottom of XBox Shipping Form

D’OHH! Now you have to tear everything out of the box, fill out the form with the XBox Serial Number which is on the back of the console, stuff the console back in the bag, stick this form in there and retape up the box. Sucks.

But all is avoidable by using good design to fix the form. You’ll see my stab at the design below:

Revised XBox 360 Form

There is the problem of how do you design the form so you can take down the information required for sending and yet still have the user fill out the form and stuff it into the box. What I would do now is detach the form part from the instruction part by having a dotted line saying detach form and include this part in the box, but it’s been a long day. =)

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