Busy Forms

April 21, 2005

There are many ways to show a form is processing once you click that submit button. You can change the submit button’s text, disable the button, go to a new page, make a popup or any combination of the aforementioned. Here at IDI we will be using some of these techniques on the next version of ARRAY Express. We all know that guiding a person through a form can be a challenge sometimes, especially when they click that submit and they expect something to happen immediatly. We use a technique we call ‘busy forms’ to make the process smoother and more anticipated. Busy forms allows the person to know something is going on once they click that submit button.

It is rather quite simple technique. We use the expandCollapse javascript function and an animated gif image. You can test it out here on a sample page or see a live version on my contact form.

Anticipating what a person would expect upon submitting a form is important with the overall experience. Online forms inherently can take a few seconds to process sometimes and this technique provides them with an instant and clear message that it is processing or busy.