Most template galleries are organised by what the form is called. That is useless when you are starting from a problem rather than a noun: you know you need to stop double-booking the treatment room, not that you are looking for an "appointment booking form".
So this list is organised by the job. For each one there is the template to start from and the single question that most often gets left out, which is usually the one that causes the problem the form was meant to solve.
Getting people to contact you
The contact form is the most copied and least thought-about form on the internet. Three fields and a text box is the right answer for most sites, and the interesting decisions are about routing rather than about fields.
- Contact form. The default. Ask what it is about, so sales and support do not land in the same inbox.
- Support request. Separate from contact, because a bug report and a sales enquiry have almost nothing in common. Ask for the browser and the device: it saves a day per ticket.
- Callback request. The missing question is always the window. "When are you free" produces "anytime", which means four voicemails.
- Press enquiry. The missing question is the deadline. A journalist on a two-hour deadline behind a general queue is a story you lose.
- General enquiry. One routing question at the top and conditional logic underneath, so a supplier and a customer do not answer the same irrelevant fields.
Finding out what people think
Feedback forms fail in a specific way: they collect ratings nobody acts on, and the acting is the entire point. Before you build one, decide who reads it and what they are allowed to change. If the answer is nobody and nothing, do not send it.
- Customer feedback. One rating you track over time, one open question about what to fix. Resist the twenty-scale version.
- Net Promoter Score. Two questions. The reason for the score is where every usable piece of information lives.
- CSAT survey. Ask immediately after the thing you are measuring. A week later you are measuring memory.
- Product feedback. Ask what they were trying to do before you ask what they want built.
- Event feedback. Collect it in the room. A QR code on the final slide beats an email the following week several times over.
- Website feedback. Put it on the page where analytics say people leave, not in a footer nobody clicks.
Taking applications
Application forms are where good candidates give up. The test is simple: could somebody finish this on a phone in ten minutes? If not, you are filtering for patience rather than ability.
- Job application. Do not make people retype their CV. Ask two or three questions a CV cannot answer instead.
- Volunteer application. Ask for availability in specific windows. "Weekends" is not something you can build a rota from.
- Grant application. Long by necessity, which makes save-and-resume the feature that matters most.
- Membership application. Details, agreement and payment in one submission, or you will be chasing people who joined and never paid.
- Vendor application. Ask for the insurance certificate up front. It is the thing that holds everything up in the final week.
Booking time and places
Anything with a limited number of slots has the same failure mode: two people get the same one. A date typed into a text field is a request. A slot taken from live availability is a booking, and the difference only shows up when two people submit at once.
- Event registration. Ask about accessibility requirements. It costs one question and avoids somebody finding out on the day.
- Appointment booking. Show real availability and hold the slot rather than emailing back to arrange one.
- Class booking. The health questions are the ones you will wish you had asked.
- Workshop signup. Ask what they already know. It saves the first half hour of the session.
- Wedding RSVP. Dietary needs per guest, not per invitation. One household can have three different answers.
Selling things and quoting for work
If your pricing is a formula, a calculator beats a quote request every time. People who get a number convert; people who are promised one within two working days mostly do not come back.
- Order form. A checkout without a shop behind it. Confirm the order back by email, because most disputes come from an order nobody has in writing.
- Quote request. Ask only what changes the price. Quantity and specification do. Job title does not.
- Quote calculator. Show the figure, then offer to email it. Holding the number hostage loses the people who were ready to buy.
- ROI calculator. Be conservative. A calculator that returns an absurd figure destroys the credibility of everything around it.
- Project brief. Ask what is out of scope. It is uncomfortable and it is the most useful line in the document three months later.
Every field on a form trades volume for information. The only question worth asking is whether what you learn is worth more than the people you lose.
How to choose between them
Start from what happens after the form. If a human reads every submission and acts on it, you can afford to ask more, because the cost of a vague answer is somebody's afternoon. If the submission goes into a list that gets processed in bulk, ask less, because nobody is going to chase a missing detail anyway.
Then count the questions you cannot act on. Most forms have two or three fields that nobody has ever looked at, usually because they were on the form it was copied from. Those are free to remove and they are where the easiest conversion gains live.
Everything above is free to start from, lands in your workspace as an editable draft, and needs no card. Change every question in it, because none of these are right for you as they stand.
The four questions that decide every form
Whichever template you start from, the same four decisions determine whether it works. They are worth making deliberately rather than inheriting.
- How long is too long? Count the questions you would act on differently depending on the answer. That is the real length. Everything else is decoration that costs you completions.
- One page or one at a time? A single page suits anything people want to review before submitting. One question at a time suits anything where the length is the problem, because nobody can see the scrollbar.
- Who reads it? If a person reads every submission, you can afford to ask more. If it goes into a list processed in bulk, ask less, because nobody will chase a missing detail.
- What happens after submit? The page after the form is the most wasted space in forms. Say when they will hear back and confirm what they told you.
Templates for things that are not really forms
Some of the most useful ones are not forms in the way people mean the word. They are small tools that happen to be built out of questions, and they tend to outperform everything else on this list because the person filling them in gets something back immediately.
- Quote calculator. Returns a price rather than promising one. Converts better than any quote request form, and filters out the people who were never going to afford it.
- ROI calculator. Lets a buyer convince themselves, which works far better than being convinced, and gives them the figures they need to persuade whoever holds the budget.
- Lead qualification quiz. Asks what a sales call would ask and gives a recommendation in return. People answer honestly to get a result, which is why it qualifies better than a contact form.
- Personality quiz. The result is the incentive. Ask for an email after the last question and expect better conversion than any download.
- Classroom quiz. Marks itself and shows which questions the room got wrong, which is worth more than the marks.