Unsurprisingly, context is everything, and for some things standard forms are clearer and win in UX. Some sites saw conversions decrease from using mad lib forms, some saw them increase.
At least you can see the X - for some reason I only see the middle-third of the overlay, and can't close it. If I were interested in signing up for their list, I couldn't do that either.
Thanks for the comments everyone... By the way, sorry for the popup issues! We have actually been testing different timing/copy for popups for a blog post titled, "How to Create Popups That Don't Suck". In fact, could we use a screenshot of your responses within the post.. in response to the what not to do section?
On site messaging is a big part of what we provide, so we are always trying to learn, improve, and share those learnings on our blog.
This seems potentially psychologically manipulative to me since the form is putting words in the user's mouth. E.g. the example in the article: "My name is -blank- and I'm looking for the cheapest auto insurance." Maybe price is not the user's only concern, but this sign up form says it is. It would be interesting to see if these forms can actually change the user's views. (Sort of like NLP tries to do.) I.e. does the user's prioritization of price vs customer service vs coverage quality get changed by this style of signup vs a regular sign up.
Depending on what you're asking for, this can also be more clear than the traditional boring way (especially if there's no inline help text, say for spreadsheet column headers). It's not just for signing up new users for things.
I love it ... but I would also say that, in general, mad libs are good for creating shareable content :) People feel ownership of something after they've customized it, and crowdsourcing the answers make it easier for them to just pick some of the ones already there, for each field. A few people would add new ones and you would have to manually review them and add them to the pool for everyone else to choose from.
Was going to say the same thing. I hate to be pedantic, but a better term is "fill in the blank". Traditional forms would actually be closer to a MadLibs interface than this.
Still, I knew exactly what the form was from calling it a MadLibs form, so it didn't confuse me.
Unsurprisingly, context is everything, and for some things standard forms are clearer and win in UX. Some sites saw conversions decrease from using mad lib forms, some saw them increase.
A/B test it if you do this.