Designing better forms requires data about how users interact with them. These seven tools help with different parts of that process: understanding where forms fail, testing how users experience them, checking accessibility, and researching what evidence-based form design looks like across products and contexts. All have a meaningful free tier.
1. Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity is a free behavioral analytics tool that records user sessions and generates heatmaps of click, scroll, and interaction patterns. For form design, the session recording feature is particularly valuable: you can watch how users interact with specific form fields, where they pause, which fields they re-enter, and at which point they abandon the form.
Clarity's "rage click" and "dead click" detection automatically flags interactions where users appear frustrated (rapid repeated clicks) or where clicks are not triggering expected responses. Both of these patterns frequently appear in form interaction data and can surface problems with small touch targets, confusing validation states, and non-interactive-looking submit buttons.
The session recording capability does not capture personally identifiable information or form field contents by default, which makes it safer to use on forms without additional configuration. The free tier includes unlimited session recordings and heatmaps.
2. Google Analytics 4 (with Event Tracking)
Google Analytics 4 tracks user behavior across your site and can be configured with custom events to measure form-specific metrics: how many users viewed a form, how many started it, how many completed it, and what percentage abandoned at each step of a multi-step form.
The funnel analysis feature in GA4 allows you to define a sequence of steps and see the dropout rate at each point. For multi-step forms, this reveals exactly which step drives the most abandonment. For single-page forms with multiple fields, field-level events require manual event implementation, but the resulting data is highly specific to your actual form and users.
GA4 is free at standard traffic volumes. The event tracking setup for forms requires some JavaScript implementation, but the payoff in diagnostic specificity is significant.
3. Maze (Free Tier)
Maze is an unmoderated user testing platform that lets you create tasks for users to complete, including filling out a prototype or live form, and then analyzes where users get stuck or fail. The free tier includes a limited number of tests per month and access to the core path and mission metrics.
For form testing, Maze is useful for discovering usability problems before launch by having representative users attempt to complete the form while recording where they hesitate, fail, or succeed. The platform aggregates results across multiple participants and shows paths through the form as a visual flow.
The unmoderated format means testing can happen asynchronously without requiring you to be present, which makes it practical to run a quick test before shipping a form change.
For the principles behind what these tools help you identify, the guide at 137foundry.com/articles/how-to-design-web-forms-users-complete covers validation patterns, field count, mobile layout, and error message design in detail.
4. WAVE Accessibility Checker
WebAIM produces WAVE, a browser-based accessibility evaluation tool that checks web pages including forms for accessibility errors and warnings. Running WAVE on a form reveals missing labels, insufficient color contrast, unlabeled form controls, and missing ARIA attributes that would make the form inaccessible to users of assistive technology.
The browser extension version evaluates pages in their current state, including dynamic states like validation errors, which makes it more useful for form accessibility testing than crawling-based tools that only see the initial page state.
WAVE is free as both a browser extension and a web-based tool. For teams embedding accessibility checks in a development workflow, the API version allows automated scanning as part of a CI pipeline.
5. Axe DevTools (Free Browser Extension)
The axe DevTools browser extension from Deque Systems performs automated accessibility audits on web pages. Like WAVE, it identifies accessibility violations and provides specific guidance on how to fix them.
Where axe differentiates itself for development teams is in its integration with the browser DevTools panel, making it easy to inspect specific elements alongside their accessibility issues. The extension is built on the same axe-core rules used by tools like Jest-axe and Playwright's accessibility testing APIs, which means issues found in browser testing with axe are consistent with what automated testing will catch.
The free extension covers a substantial portion of WCAG 2.1 violations. The paid DevTools Pro version adds guided testing and more comprehensive rule sets.
6. The A11y Project Checklist
The A11y Project maintains a comprehensive checklist of web accessibility requirements organized by WCAG criteria. For form design specifically, the checklist covers labels, error identification, keyboard navigation, focus management, and timeout notifications, all in plain language that is more actionable than reading the WCAG specification directly.
This is a reference tool rather than a testing tool, but using it as a design checklist before building a form reduces the number of accessibility fixes required after testing. It is particularly useful for designers and developers who are not accessibility specialists and need a clear, prioritized list of what to check.
7. Nielsen Norman Group Research Reports (Free Articles)
The Nielsen Norman Group makes a substantial portion of its UX research findings freely available in article form. For form design, the NNG article archive covers field ordering, label placement, error message design, mobile form patterns, multi-step form design, and checkout UX in detail backed by usability studies.
While the full research reports require a subscription or purchase, the free articles provide enough evidence-based guidance to inform most form design decisions. Searching the NNG archive for "form design" or "form usability" returns a large set of relevant articles that can be used as a reference layer alongside your own testing data.
How These Tools Work Together
Using these tools together covers the full form design and validation cycle. Clarity and Google Analytics provide behavioral data from real users on your live forms. Maze lets you test with representative users before or alongside launch. WAVE and Axe check accessibility compliance at the implementation level. The A11y Project gives you a reference checklist for design decisions. NNG research provides the evidence base for why certain patterns work and others do not.
UX and web studio 137Foundry builds and tests forms as part of broader web design and development projects. The web development services page describes how form design and UX testing fit into our project process.
The World Wide Web Consortium maintains the WCAG accessibility standards that WAVE, Axe, and the A11y Project checklist are built around, and provides the authoritative reference for understanding accessibility requirements at a specification level.
The most effective approach to form improvement combines at least two of these tools: one that provides behavioral data from real users (Clarity, GA4) and one that provides a way to understand the why behind that behavior (Maze user testing, NNG research). Behavioral data tells you where users stop. User testing and research tell you why. Acting on behavioral data without understanding why the abandonment is happening can lead to fixing symptoms rather than the underlying design problem. The combination of quantitative data and qualitative insight is what produces form improvements that hold up over time rather than winning a single A/B test and then plateauing.
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