When you design forms for a user to fill out, such as a checkout process, do you put all the information on one page or do you separate it out into multiple pages?
You might have heard that 1000 clear screens are better than 1 cluttered screen. So if you go with the latter option of separating a form into multiple pages — such as a contact information page, payment method page, etc., should you use pagination or not? Let’s discuss below:
What is Pagination?
Pagination is numbers or marks used to indicate the sequence of pages. Well, why is this important? People want to know how many pages are left so they know whether or not they want to continue looking through something or not. If you were given an eCommerce website with infinite scrolling with over 1000 different items to choose from but you had no way of knowing when it would end, you would most likely quit before reaching the end. So it is important to allow users to know that there is an end with pagination depending on what industry your product is for. For example, you probably would not use pagination for a social media page where you want people to discover new content because infinite scrolling is better suited for that.
So why should you use Pagination in form design?
This is not the case for every form design but if you know you need a lot of information and you would have to breakdown your form into multiple sections to get all this information, you should think about including pagination in these forms. Whether that be a % completed bar on top, dot marks to show which section they are on at the bottom, or just words such as <Contact Info, Payment Method, Shipping Address, Place Order> at the top would work as well. This allows users to know how much more information is needed from them before they complete the form.
However, it is important that if you separate these forms into multiple sections that they are relatively equal or less in the amount of information you need to collect. If the first page has 3 questions and the second page has 6, users are more likely to quit before finishing than if you had 5 questions in the beginning and then an additional 4 on the following page. Users do not like giving out more information than they need to, so do think about what you are asking from them and if it is necessary to include them into the forms before making it.
I hope you enjoyed this short read and I’d like to hear your thoughts on this! Feel free to leave a comment below.
