When Form UX Sucks

When was the last time you tested every single form on your site to see if it works from a users perspective. Tonight when I was filling in a form on the Eurotunnel site it seems to me that even a big travel firm such as these guys haven’t spared the time to actually used their form.

They’re using a really common form control - the JQuery UI date picker for a date of birth field.  On the face of it, that seems like a perfectly reasonable plan - date pickers can make certain that users don’t enter invalid date formats. The problem is that it forces you to enter your date of birth backwards.  You’re presented with a form with the current month’s dates to chose from.  But this isn’t the right year (by a long way in my case).  So I tried typing in my date of birth, but the control doesn’t let you type dates in. So now I have to chose my year of birth from a drop down list scrolling back the best part of 40 years, then month of birth, and finally chose the day.

It just didn’t work as an intuitive way to enter a date of birth, and if anyone had actually used the form as a users perspective they’d realise that.  Unfortunately I’d already booked my tickets so had no choice but to use the form.So when was the last time you checked your forms make sense from a users perspective.