Of the projects that I've worked on recently (and in the past), I'm amazed at how much people are willing to spend on "superficial" design, but forget about the little they spend on "functional" design. The two aren't mutually exclusive, but rarely do people get both.

Generally, when I'm called in, I'm called in for ideas. This is a big part of our job. Clients bounce ideas off of us, "Would this be possible?,"Why would we do it this way?","Take a look at this and tell me what you think?","How can I increase sign ups?" One of the really great things about working with companies who place a value on this sort of thing is that they like science anytime it gives them results, and they actually want to hear about the science.

So, when I was asked my opinion on an auction project (in October 2007), I was very surprised that while over 40% of the site was forms, there had been no importance placed on actually designing forms for accessibility or ease of use. The same thing happened on an auction project I looked over in December! I'm getting excited now, because it was obvious that these companies put a lot of money into the sites.

If the most important elements of your sites require form usage you have to, or at least have your developer/interfacer/grandma look at this article and pdf by Luke W about Best Practices and Web Form Design. At the blog UX Matters (UX stands for user experience), Matteo Penzo talks about (and bases his test around Luke's presentation) results of unstyled, raw data as it relates to form performance.

Research shows we have a lot of hits on our ____ page, but for whatever reason they're not making it through the sign-up.

I love looking at problems like this because it gives me a chance to play Sherlock Holmes, but the culprit 80% of the time is simply that users don't understand how to sign up, even when there's a huge button there that says, "I agree".

Why? Because occasionally, users don't register "I agree" as sign up button, or the button requires one to click a check box before it (the answer isn't to get rid of the check box, it's to present the check box in a way that user can recognize it).

Sometimes, users don't even get that far because the form is too taxing. The form is intimidating. They look at the form, they scroll down the form, and then they leave. Basically, the more information the form asks for, the less likely the user is to complete it and that's in conjunction with the best form practices.

So one of the things, that we must do(designers... even if you're not a UX or UI designer) is make the sign-up process as painless as possible. We can do this by styling, by using best web form practices, we can talk clients into cutting down on the collection of redundant or un-needed data.

For a second imagine that these aren't established websites that already have a wide enough user-base, that they're new kids on the block and they all do basically the same thing (allow users to share videos), which would you be more likely to sign up at Vimeo, Youtube or Ourmedia? Chances are you (and many users) would have signed up for Youtube and Vimeo, but Our media might have lost you.