I found a link to this Purina pet food offer via DealLocker this morning, and being a pet owner myself (and one always looking for pet food coupons), I decided to go from clicker to customer for Purina.

Well, at least I tried to.

After filling out this relatively lengthy lead generation form, I went to hit submit, and nothing happened. The form didn’t seem to submit, and no obvious errors were thrown. After hitting the button two more times and getting the same non-result, I scrolled to the very top of the page (manually) and found the error notification.

Buried amongst the intro text, and in the same font and font color, there was a vague error that said:

There has been a problem submitting the information, please check your information and try again.

No further info provided.

I scanned the page again, looking at each field, and submitted once again, confident that I had not missed a field…nothing.

Not much more to this story, other than a reminder to all of your form designers out there, especially ones that are presumably paying a CPC to get users to a form, and therefore live and die by the conversion rates of these forms.

Make forms easy to parse, easy to fill out, and for god sakes…make the error messages (when errors appear) clear and verbose! Error messages should stand out from the form text in color and weight, and should point you to the fields where the error is occurring (auto-jumping to the error), telling you exactly what the error is, so that you can fix it.