Why Users Fill Out Forms Faster with Top Aligned Labels

mag­ine a user who is really excited about your prod­uct or ser­vice. They’re ready to sign up, so they go to your form page and start fill­ing out their infor­ma­tion. The way you align your labels with your form fields can affect how easy it is for users to fill out the form. Do you want to give users a quick, easy and pain­less expe­ri­ence or do you want to give them a has­sle? If you want to make their expe­ri­ence quick, easy and pain­less, con­sider using top aligned labels for your form fields.

Top aligned labels are faster and eas­ier to fill out than left or right aligned labels. This is because top aligned labels require half as many visual fix­a­tions than left or right aligned labels. Top aligned labels also allow users to move down the form in one visual direc­tion, instead of two visual direc­tions with left and right aligned labels. This makes fill­ing out forms quicker and easier.

The only draw­back with top aligned labels is that they can make the form long. How­ever, on the web, where users scroll often, this doesn’t seem like a big prob­lem. In fact, by reduc­ing the font size of the labels and the white­space between fields you can decrease the form length. You can also break the form up into mul­ti­ple pages to make each part of the form shorter.

The dif­fer­ence is clear. Top aligned labels are eas­ier on the eyes, and make long forms sim­ple and easy to fill out. Even though they may make forms look longer, when the user actu­ally uses the form they’ll notice a dra­matic dif­fer­ence in the time and effort it takes to com­plete the form. If users are able to have a bet­ter expe­ri­ence with forms, then using top aligned labels is well worth it. The form expe­ri­ence is an impor­tant aspect to web design. Design­ers should care­fully think about how they align form field labels because it can often make the dif­fer­ence between a user com­plet­ing the form or aban­don­ing it.