On March 26th, 2018, Google announced that after a year and a half of careful experimentation and testing, they've started migrating sites that follow the best practices for mobile-first indexing. Though being indexed mobile-first has no ranking advantage, Google strongly encouraged webmasters to make their content mobile-friendly.
We thought the most unfriendly thing about browsing on mobile was filling out monotonous form after form when trying to contact someone on their site or when making a purchase. The last thing a user wants to do when making a purchase is to type in line after line of personal information. The tedious process of entering every single letter and symbol when filling out an online form can even cause users to decide not to purchase. A 2017 study by Google Chrome found that disabling the autofill feature on the browser led to 25% fewer form submissions. We saw this as an opportunity to optimize user experience by making forms quicker and easier to fill out.
What We Did
If you want more conversions, simplify your forms. We took this principle and applied it to a site called Cayman Condos. If you access any form on the site via your mobile device, you'll notice the default keys on your keyboard will change. This is the result of editing HTML input values to reflect a description. By editing these attributes, we were able to change which buttons your keyboard displays relative to which form field you have selected. For example, when you have the "Email" field selected, the keyboard will display an "@" symbol, and a period.
What's Next?
We encourage everyone to optimize their forms by editing these input types. It takes next to no time and has massive upside. With mobile-first indexing having started, all eyes should be on mobile user experience as it is. By optimizing how users fill out your forms, you’ll look better in the eyes of customers and Google. Talk about two birds and one stone!
To learn exactly how to use custom input types like we did, head over to w3schools and get your editing on!