I must commend the team at Gumtree for creating a very enjoyable ad-posting process. For the purposes of selling our flat I’ve given Gumtree a go, believing that it will hopefully save me thousands of pounds of estate agent fees! I must admit I found the whole ad-submission process quicker-than-expected, engaging, and intuitive. The last two factors probably contributing to factor 1.

They’ve broken the process down into logical steps of selecting your category / your ad’s location (above), creating your ad, preview, and then submission.

They also executed helpful and usable, reveal-in-context, additional info boxes when certain fields became active (see below).

Additionally, they didn’t reveal all information to users, but only when it was required. For example, below shows the phone number input field only appearing when the relevant checkbox was checked. It makes the form shorter, appear less daunting, but also provides a sense of interactivity – adding engagement to the whole process.

The form is also designed in a way that was very uncluttered, where information elements were visually grouped and an obvious information hierarchy was present. All reducing the amount of work the user has to do to decipher all these messages for themselves.

The error message is clearly differentiated from the normal form, with different levels of message / instruction on display and a helpful, not-punishing tone of voice.

The feedback from site interactions is also quick, with no slow and clunky back-end operations adding an age to each interaction. The preview page is also uncluttered and clear, with clear CTAs in the form of bright, but not gharish, buttons.

All-in-all a great journey for the ad-poster user. Plus it’s free … lots of bonus points here. There’s lots of reassuring messages for the user about how their private contact details would (or would not) be used and, pricing information is clearly and succinctly presented. A quick confirmation email rounds off the whole process well.

Of course serving forms to users who have come to your site with a pre-determined goal in mind, and fully expecting to have to contribute certain information via a form in order to accomplish their task is one thing. Serving forms to browsing users who want to accomplish a goal with no expectation of contributing information (or at least not as much as your site is asking for) is another problem all together. In a world where everyone’s inbox is overflowing with spam, any bit of information being requested that ‘appears’ unconnected to the task-at-hand will be an additional alarm bell in users’ minds, and encourage users to bail out from completing the task. In essence, every few fields the users have to fill out, they’ll ask themselves … ‘how much do I want this?’. You can put users’ minds at ease by telling them what the information is for, and generally having a site (and brand!) that exudes credibility and integrity.

Enough about forms … let’s hope the flat now sells!