Earlier this week I needed to setup a FedEx account to have a package delivered. Since I use my iPad for most web site interactions these days I decided to sign up using the tablet and the on screen keyboard. Needless to say the experience did not go well or I would not being this as a teaching opportunity. I was able to register, but it could have gone much better and taken quite a bit less time. So today I am going to show how spending about as much time as a typical user needs to register FedEx could radically increase customer satisfaction, increase new customer registrations and reduce overhead by having frustrated users contact FedEx support channels for help.
Mobile devices are becoming a common way to access the web and devices like the iPad, Android tablets and upcoming flood of Windows 8 tablets are large chunks of market share from classic desktop and laptops. Mobile commerce is growing by numbers similar to the mid 90s when consumers began shopping online in large numbers, giving way to huge growth in package delivery companies like FedEx and UPS. So having a quality tablet experience should be a top priority for FedEx and any company wanting to interface with modern consumers and businesses.
If I have not shared enough on my blog or you have not been to one of my recent presentations on mobile development I preach a mantra of developing touch/mobile first. This includes form design. The first rule of thumb in the modern mobile, touch first architecture when it comes to online forms is to minimize the amount of fields a user needs to complete. The next rule is to drive the soft keyboard to accommodate the user. Next you want to provide the customer as much guidance and real-time validation as possible. Fortunately HTML5 gives us some new tools to enhance input types with browser native functionality.
When you create a new user on the FedEx.com site it is a two part form. The first part collects basic contact and shipping information. The second part collects credit card information. Knowing what I know about e-commerce and shipping I am not sure they could streamline the fields in the forms much more than it is. But what they could do is spend about 10 minutes of time upgrading their form’s markup to leverage the new input types and attributes to drive a much better user experience.
For a traditional desktop user these fields add some value, but where they really help is on today’s touch interfaces, like the iPad. As I will show in the screenshots below there are numerous times the experience could be much improved with very little additional markup. As tablets and smartphones become more and more ubiquitous utilizing the new HTML5 features becomes a required feature of any web form.
To start with, the first time you load the FedEx site you are prompted to select your home country. Not to divert from the main thread of this post, but using the built in geolocation functionality would make this a lot nicer the majority of time. You have a drop-down list to select your country. And FedEx does list every single country in the world, which is a rather long list to scroll through. You may be asking why not just use the keyboard to type the county? And yes that would be a good option, but most users will not realize this is an option.
#html5
